MemCachier Blog
Announcements, New Features, and How Tos
We are happy to announce a new feature for our Heroku customers. In the past we have had several requests from customer who wanted to know why their caches had been flushed. To help our clients find out how a flush command came about we now push a log message to the Heroku log whenever a cache is flushed.
We’re happy to announce the general availability of a new feature on MemCachier, the ability to connect to our servers using the memcache ASCII protocol! Our official documentation covers it here.
We are happy to announce a new design for the analytics dashboard and the ability to move your cache from one cluster to another in emergencies.
Over the last couple days the US-East-C1 cluster experienced some performance issues, the worst of which occurred on September 30th between 8:36am and 8:44am (PST), when latencies were bad enough that several customers apps were severely affected. We’re very sorry to all affected customers and want to explain what happened and what we’re doing to prevent such incidents in the future.
Recently we diagnosed an issue for several of our customers who were
using the python Django web-framework. They were all experiencing
performance issues and a reasonable amount of broken connections to
our servers. The issue was that by default Django uses a new
connection to memcached for each request. This is terrible for
performance in general, paying the cost of an extra round-trip to
setup the TCP connection, but is far worse with cloud-services like
MemCachier that have an security layer and require new connections to
be authenticated. A new connection to a MemCachier server takes at
least 3 round-trips, which increases the time to execute a single
get request by 4x.
UPDATE (Jan, 2016): As of Ubuntu 15.10, libmemcached is built with SASL support. We suggest all users migrate to an up to date version of Ubuntu.
Any Ubuntu 14.04 LTS users may have noticed that the provided libmemcached package doesn’t support SASL authentication. This is a major issue as it means that any memcache client that depends on libmemcached (which is a lot!) doesn’t work with MemCachier or similar services out-of-the-box as they can’t authenticate with our servers.
Today we officially launched on the Windows Azure Store! We’ve supported Windows Azure with MemCachier for a few weeks now but weren’t integrated into their store and management interface. After some hard work to upgrade our Haskell provisioning server, we’re now have full support for Windows Azure.
Now that MemCachier supports showing your cache statistics directly in your New Relic dashboard if you are a customer of both companies, there is a need to be able to find your New Relic license key. This is a 40 character long random string used for external services like MemCachier to send data to your dashboard.