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memcachedUsers

[Login] Change #7 by Anil Dash at 2006-08-22 21:32:34.

Who Uses memcached?

Over a quarter billion Internet users have visited sites that use memcached as part of their infrastructure. LiveJournal was the first, of course, but current users include sites like Facebook, Craigslist, Wikipedia, Slashdot, Digg, Bloglines, and Vox.

This is an very incomplete list of memcached users that we've heard about. Please mail us if you're using it, optionally with a little description of how, and we'll add you to this page. Or log in and add your own company name.

• LiveJournal -- fully dynamic blogging site with insane number of unnecessary features, doing over 20 million hits per day. We made memcached for LiveJournal and we hardly ever hit the databases anymore. A few APIs in our codebase still unconditionally hit our databases, but they're being rewritten to be memcached-aware. memcached made a night-and-day difference in the speed of our site.

• Facebook -- Facebook is a social directory that enables people to share information. Launched in February 2004, Facebook helps people better understand their world by giving them access to the information that is most relevant to them. Facebook has become the largest user of memcached and actively contribute modifications back to the project. We have contributed substantial changes back to the project, boosting the software's performance by over 20% and increasing its memory efficiency by over 30% while adding new functionality.

• Slashdot -- I showed Jamie McCarthy memcached at OSCON 2003 and how we use it on LiveJournal (including our memcached-farm stats page) and he started frothing at the mouth and began implementing it that night in his hotel room. Now Slashdot uses it for caching comments in their rendered form, saving both DB load and web CPU load. They're reportedly working on using memcached in more parts of their code.

• Wikipedia -- Brion Vibber added support to Wikipedia's MediaWiki backend. ( original announcement).

• VampireFreaks: "Hey man. I just wanted to thank you for memcached, I just started using it on http://vampirefreaks.com , a site which gets over a million page hits a day and has been really slowing down the server. I've already implemented memcached in a few key spots which determine the number of users online as well as the number of current users, and it seems to have helped a lot, I am sure I will be putting it into more parts of the code as well. Feel free to put us on the memcached users page if you like."

• SourceForge

• Revelex: "... We have tried using MySQL, NFS-mounted flat-files and even NFS-mounted RAM drives to no avail. To date, only memcached has been able to keep up with our needs. ..."

• HowardStern.com: "We've been struggling to keep the hardware matched to the traffic level and ever-growing database size. I've now implemented memcached across major sections of the site and the vBulletin-based forum. We're using three memcached servers to support the one large mySQL server. The performance improvement has been tremendous and it allows me to have an elegant memory caching solution always available instead of my own cache on the webservers' filesystems, as I had been doing."

• Kayak.com: memcached allowed Kayak.com to increase capacity of our real-time flight and hotel search engine by one order of magnitude.

Coming soon..

These sites are (or reportedly are, or were) working on memcache support to speed up their sites.

• Everything2 -- adding support for memcached to the ecore nodecache over at everydevel.com.

• *SourceForge( -- adding support, which is why the Python API for memcached was created.

[Login] Change #7 by Anil Dash at 2006-08-22 21:32:34.