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Scaling memcached at Facebook
Memcached is a well known, simple, in-memory caching solution. This paper describes how Facebook leverages memcached as a building block to construct and scale a distributed key-value store that supports the world’s largest social network.
By Facebook Scaling memcached at Facebook · Facebook · Added 2026-10-12
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Facebook wrote this paper. Read the abstract and headings first. You should know the basics: caching, queues and replication.
Ideas you will meet
- Distributed Systems
- Consensus, time, failure and the fundamentals of scale-out.
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Books · Free from the author
Concurrent and Distributed Systems (Cambridge lecture notes)
Eight lectures on time, broadcast, replication, consensus and transactions, with notes, slides and video. Free from the author under CC BY-SA.
University of CambridgeIntermediate
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Computer Networks: A Systems Approach
How networks are built and why: protocols, routing, congestion control and the internet's architecture. The authors publish it free online under CC BY 4.0.
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Scalable Web Architecture and Distributed Systems
A full chapter on the building blocks of large websites: availability, performance, reliability, scalability, caches, proxies, indexes, load balancers and queues. Free to read here under CC BY 3.0.
The Architecture of Open Source ApplicationsBeginner40 min
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