ingenthr
Steve Yen was doing a lot and fixing bugs and wrote moxi, a memcached proxy that was very useful in the early days.
With the CouchOne merger, we moved a lot of the proxy topology independence into clients and added a lot more.
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By the way, on the source, it was never intended "dumping" style but just a bunch of stuff that had been slowly wired together. Yeah, we use repo and gerrit quite a bit. Check out review.couchbase.org sometime.
It wasn't about resource constraints; it that we felt going after distributed deployments and having the speed to keep up with application demands (mostly driven by CRUD) was important. That's what devs and ops people kept telling us they'd need.
Have a look at http://blog.northscale.com/northscale-blog/2010/07/what-exac... and http://dustin.github.com/2010/06/29/memcached-vbuckets.html for good technical content.
moxi does this with a key prefix and a timeout per item (even 1 second makes a big difference for hot data), then fetching it from the authoritative server.
We've not really exploited this moxi functionality in membase deployments yet, but it's been there in moxi for a year now and could be easily turned on if we had a deployment which needed it.
Having said all of that, with membase (as with memcached) the limit you'll hit first for an item you're fetching is network throughput. It's not that common to be fetching a few items so much that you overrun network. Even if you do, then the answer is simple: add a few more nodes.