For those of you who've peeked into the memcached source code, you've probably seen the 30 or so odd MEMCACHED_FOOBAR() statistics calls or probes strewn throughout the codebase. These are actually DTrace probes, and Matt Ingenthron's put up a post describing some of the basics on to use them.
If you're going to OSCON 2009, we're going to be there too! Looking forward to catching up with friends and meeting new folks -- we'll be hanging out in the hallways, bouncing around different sessions and (just like everyone else) on the hunt for power outlets. Just come up and say hi to any of us.
A couple of our remote NorthScalers have flown in for the first time, as OSCON's a longtime annual ritual. Especially, welcome aboard, Patrick Galbraith! Congratulations of your new book, Developing Web Applications with Apache, MySQL, memcached, and Perl! I have my signed copy already. Patrick's jumping in right away to work on NorthScale's management and monitoring software for memcached.
One indelible OSCON memory already: Monty Widenius of MySQL fame bought the PostgreSQL t-shirt off of Josh Berkus's back, as
part of an auction/donation to the PostgreSQL cause. Once you see a shirtless Josh Berkus -- posing arms embraced with Monty Widenius no less -- you cannot un-see it.
So, word is getting around that memcached 1.4 has shifted from release candidate to release! Twitter was all abuzz yesterday. New in this release: binary protocol, performance improvements, new statistics and new CAS operations among others. There are a couple of good sized sites running the release candidate in production, and I'm sure more will jump in soon. You can find the details in the memcached release notes.
The release notes are well written and worth a read, but they're particularly interesting to some of us at NorthScale. Why? This release includes work proposed way back at the first memcached hackathon hosted at Facebook. Dustin was at that hackathon and yesterday he recalled for me how some of the new features came about. For instance, one large arc which started then is the binary protocol. It had been bantered about on the list and in subsequent hackathons, and is now in a dot-even release (which in memcached parlance is a production release) along with the other features covered in the release notes.
To me personally, this release is of special interest. My little patch has qualified me to join my other NorthScale colleagues, Dustin and Steve, as a code contributor along with the core contributors I've known for some time: dormando, Toru Maesaka, Trond Norbye, Brian Aker... so many others to list.
It should get more interesting from here as people wade in and start using the new functionality in the server and the updated clients. If nothing else, those running at the extremes, may see their sites runs just a little bit faster.
We hope to see either your kudos or questions on the list!
