Web development in Leeds from Thirdrock Internet

In-memory caching using memcache

22nd March 2011

Thirdrock has been lucky enough to work on a wide range of web developments over the years ranging from brochureware to full ecommerce solutions and social networks. To me, the most interesting projects are high-demand websites which provide real change within our clients' business. For high-demand sites, we've often found that the performance bottlenecks have been found between the web server and database server, as more and more demands are placed on dynamic data. To overcome these bottlenecks we've successfully implemented memcache - a memory caching system which reduces demand on the underlying database and dramatically improves website performance.

It's important to correctly identify the kind of data that's going to be cachable without the need to revisit the database every few seconds; this is something which comes with experience and a thorough understanding of the web application. But when done well, we've found memcache to be hugely beneficial in improving website performance for a number of our clients.

Needless to say, we've rolled in-memory caching into our standard development framework, giving us performance improvements wherever we see they're required in any of our web developments.

Thirdrock thinks...