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A comment on What are the best non-database solutions you've seen? What did Viaweb use?. Parent comment

Re:What are the best non-database solutions you've seen? Wha... by dhouston on Thursday April 19, 2007 @02:37PM (#14709)
memcached (google it) implements this idea (giant in-memory hash table), and scales to multiple machines. used by facebook and lots of other very high volume sites.

it's often also used as an LRU cache on top of a normal database so that you can still get the benefits of persistence and rich queries but use memcached to lower the number of hits to the disk/DB.

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Re:What are the best non-database solutions you've seen? Wha... by ntoshev on Sunday April 22, 2007 @09:52AM (#15702)
With memchached you pay the performance price for interprocess communication to get to the data in your hashtable, even when the data are on the same machine. The RoR / PHP / Python models for web development have each request running in different process, so this is unavoidable for them. Java / C++ are more suitable for pg's architecture (obviously Arc / Lisp too).

Also when you use memchached as a db cache, be preprared to lose some transactional properies of the database storage.

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