Jasjeet Thind

Memcached, a distributed cache for data / object storage in memory, is very important for scaling and improving response time performance. This is especially important for Social websites, which heavily depend on slow outbound data services (e.g. Facebook, database, Identity services, etc.).

To mitigate overhead of heap memory allocation / deallocation, memcached organizes itself into slabs, pages, and chunks. Here I draw a fictitious example in illustration:

At startup, the specified maximum amount of RAM isallocated for the cache with a growth factor.

For instance, the command “memcached -m 64 -f 3″ allocates 64 MB in RAM with growth factor of 3. The default smallest chunk size is 96 bytes. If each page is 1 MB, then approx 64 pages will be initially free and not assigned to any slab.

When code writes data into cache, 1 of the free pages will be allocated to slab class. Saw we write 50 byte data into cache, this will be stored in a 96 byte chunk inside. All cache data – key + value + overhead – is stored inside a chunk. 1 free page will be allocated to a slab class that only holds 96 byte chunks.

Here is a short blog by Mike Perham on concepts of slabs, pages and chunks in memcached distributed in-memory cache store:

http://www.mikeperham.com/2009/06/22/slabs-pages-chunks-and-memcached/

This blog explains LRU in memcached:
http://work.tinou.com/2011/04/memcached-for-dummies.html

Posted in Technology