R-memcached: A reliable in-memory cache for big key-value stores

Abstract

Large-scale key-value stores are widely used in many Web-based systems to store huge amount of data as (key, value) pairs. In order to reduce the latency of accessing such (key, value) pairs, an in-memory cache system is usually deployed between the front-end Web system and the back-end database system. In practice, a cache system may consist of a number of server nodes, and fault tolerance is a critical feature to maintain the latency Service-Level Agreements (SLAs). In this paper, we present the design, implementation, analysis, and evaluation of R-Memcached, a reliable in-memory key-value cache system that is built on top of the popular Memcached software. R-Memcached exploits coding techniques to achieve reliability, and can tolerate up to two node failures. Our experimental results show that R-Memcached can maintain very good latency and throughput performance even during the period of node failures.