memcached (and facebook)
I'm really impressed that so many big companies, like facebook and google, have taken the time to release patches and source code, back out to the open-source community. Being able to improve memcached throughput from 50,000 requests/s to 200,000 requests/s is an amazing achievement.
The changes that the facebook guys have made to memcache are going to help a lot of people out there, including fonolo. We're using memcache heavily in-house, not only for web-based caching, but for a lot of the back-end VoIP and speech recognition applications.
We, obviously, don't require the throughput that facebook does- given they just recently released data that showed they were adding more than 600,000 new users per day, more than 70% of which are coming from outside the USA. That's growth at a staggering rate!
I have to say, that I'm a fan of facebook, and what they've managed to achieve, in a relatively short amount of time- I just have to wonder how long it will all last? Increasing your user-base by 600,000 users per-day; where is the plateau? Will it all eventually just topple over on itself?
Imagine when the next big social networking app comes out; will there be a mass-exodus from one to the other? or will facebook be so far in-grained in it's users, that they won't have any other choice but to stay?
No matter what happens, it's nice to know facebook is working out all the bugs for us.