MemCachier Blog
Announcements, New Features, and How Tos
Update (March 6th, 2018): In view of the widespread DDoS attacks involving memcached servers we would like to clarify that MemCachier is not vulnerable to these kinds of attacks as we use a custom built memcached server optimized for security and performance in a cloud environment. More info about the attack and how to prevent it can be found here.
Memcache is a technology that helps web apps and mobile app backends in two main ways: performance and scalability. We’ll discuss each of these in detail below, but first we’ll introduce memcache briefly.
Update: We no longer use basic ring consistent hashing. We further improved our consistent hashing by implementing Maglev hashing. Read MagLev, our new consistent hashing scheme.
One great MemCachier feature is built-in support for consistent hashing. Consistent hashing ultimately gives you better hit ratios when servers in your cache are either added or removed. In this post we’ll explain consistent hashing and show you why you should care.
We’re excited to announce MemCachier’s general availability in AppHarbor’s add-on market, the leading platform-as-a-service .NET provider. For those of you unfamiliar, MemCachier manages and scales clusters of memcache servers so you can focus on your app. Get started with 15MB of memcache for free in AppHarbor. Currently MemCachier is only available in us-east.
On May 29th MemCachier was on the front page of Hacker News for just over two hours. Although I was initially super excited about the exposure we got, the excitement faded when we observed hardly any impact to our meaningful metrics – new and upgraded customers. The rest of this post will explain exactly how the Hacker News exposure impacted us.
MemCachier is a new service. Since May we’ve been growing more rapidly than we anticipated, and we’ve been struggling to catch up. Some of you may have been noticing short downtime that happens every few days.
First, let me apologize about this downtime. We’re working hard to resolve the issue, and we’re not proud that it’s taken us this long to get there. However, in an attempt to be honest and upfront, I want to explain what’s going on and how we’re trying to address the issue.
Amongst all the Facebook IPO buzz was a little website that let anyone make a prediction about what the closing price would be on IPO day, facebookipodayclosingprice.com. James Proud put the site together super quickly at the request of Chris Sacca.
Randall Degges just added MemCachier to his Django automatic memcache module, which makes setting up MemCachier in Django as easy as installing a module. We’ll show you how.
We’re very excited to announce that MemCachier is fully live, operational, and running as an addon in Heroku! MemCachier is a managed, easy-to-use, and cheap solution for memcache in Heroku.
In-memory caches, like MemCachier, are great for speeding up access to popular or expensive database queries. But they can also help if your app uses an external data-source like the Facebook Developer API. Unfortunately, such APIs are often too high latency to service dynamic social applications alone. For example, I built a simple Facebook application that relies on caching to provide real-time search of users’ social graph. You can grab the code from GitHub here.