We’ve known about the secret scaling powers of memcache for some time (Here’s a list of sites using it) , BUT … I have just read some slides from a presentation which provides an overview of how facebook is using memcache. (Slide 21)

Facebook uses

• 200 dedicated memcache servers
• Each server is 16GB quad core AMD64
• Over 3Tb of memcache

Wow 3 Terabytes of memcache ! - It looks like memcache is the application stack for facebook. Memcache and equivalent tools will change the way that people think about design and structure of their application. Just because you’ve got a blazingly fast memory doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t tune your database !

We’ve just noticed that there is an pgmemcache API for memcache and Postgresql. Now we have to think about where do you put your cache ? at the application level or the database level ?

FYI: The facebook team have been contributing to the memcache source and they recommend that you use v 1.2.x rather than 1.1.x . (Note Debian and ubuntu has 1.1.3 by default, you’ll need to manually install the new package)

Here are the slides from our talks at Bar camp.

John & Paul on “Why your website is SLOW and how you can make it fast!” - John’s slides in PDF (2.2Mb) and Paul’s slides in PDF (87K )

Tom on “Space, Place and the meaning of Where” - (Powerpoint 7.5Mb and Openoffice 7Mb)

We had a great time talking to everyone and putting faces to some famous bloggers.

Kudos to both Mike’s, Nat and Fronde staff for putting on a fantastic event!

“Talk is cheap, because supply exceeds demand.” - Anonymous

Seth Godin, has just posted an answer to a question he ask was asked on “Why do you give away your ideas so freely ?”.

Here’s what he said….

I responded that ideas are easy, doing stuff is hard.

My feeling is that the more often you create and share ideas, the better you get at it. The process of manipulating and ultimately spreading ideas improves both the quality and the quantity of what you create, at least it does for me.

And the clincher for me …

History is littered with inventors who had “great” ideas but kept them quiet and then poorly executed them. And history is lit up with do-ers who took ideas that were floating around in the ether and actually made something happen. In fact, just about every successful venture is based on an unoriginal idea, beautifully executed.

There are a lot of really smart people with great ideas and a lot of talk. It takes a lot of balls to ante up and do the hard yards to make things happen. Trade Me is clear example of an unoriginal idea, superbly executed!

We’ve added a couple extra sections to the ProjectX blog this morning.

• Project Bookshelf -What books are on our bookshelf and what we’re reading and thinking about buying.
• Xlinks - We’ve added a tumblr log to post all of the links and snippets that we have found in our travels around the internet. We’ll be posting links more regularly rather than bundling them up in links posts. (Thanks to Hayden and Nat for the inspiration to give Tumblr a go.)

Enjoy!

Some useful links (besides the obligatory introductions and tutorials)

• http://www.noobkit.com for ruby, rails api reference all in one site
• http://dev.rubyonrails.org to keep in touch with enhancements with Rails
• http://agilewebdevelopment.com for a good and usable list of plugins
• http://workingwithrails.com for Ruby social networking

Some Rails blogs I have in my aggregator

• http://www.therailsway.com
• http://www.rubyinside.com
• http://weblog.rubyonrails.com

Here a svg image of the time line of the various web browsers.

I wonder if someone is game enough to make a timeline for mobile browsers

Business

• Interview with Joel Spolsky: What it takes to run a good software company
• How to hire a professional CEO

Tech

• Java compression comparison tool
  
• High performance javascript
• Javascript for all ages
• Squid optimisation
• Drawing with Canvas
• Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All - A programmer’s rant about statistics
• Data visualisation on Twitter
• Joel on Software - Log everything from high scalability.com