While working on high traffic web-sites, software developers are often confronted with the question of how to increase performance of the application. I would like to talk about one of the commonly recurring scenarios:
- The application does lot of computation to gather requested information. These computations are quite memory intensive
- The results are generally stored in a normalized manner in an RDBMS before being rendered to the caller
- The same information is requested by multiple clients resulting in multiple RDBMS hits and thus resulting in performance deterioration
In this context, we thought of using a Caching framework which help us in significantly reducing the DB hits and hence get a noticeable performance gain in terms of response times.
There are many frameworks available today which provide object level caching. I will be sharing my experience about Memcached framework. As explained on their home page, it’s an open source caching system which also provides distributed object caching support. The list of clients using Memcached to alleviate Database load is pretty impressive. Please visit their web-site for more information.
Technology for Business Excellence 