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by tempest_ 4 hours ago
I stopped using memcached a decade a go in favour of Redis and now use valkey.

Never felt the need to go back to memcached except when a legacy dependency needed it.

1 comments

OK.

What do you think of the argument made in the article?

I don't want my cache to silently fail.

Clustering redis is not that hard even if you do it manually and I have only had to do it once.

I never use redis persistence and have a max size set with LRU or whatever the application requires.

With memcached I remember having to mess around the LD_LIBRARY path to link whatever python module I was using at the time

> silently fail

Mature ops would be tracking cache hit ratios right?

It sounds like memcached would be really good in a use case where you really just need an optional stateless pure cache with absolutely zero rope to hang yourself on. A use case where "cache hit ratio" is the goal, not "fiddly in-memory data store".

> Mature ops would be tracking cache hit ratios right?

Sure, and sentry integrates well with redis in python which is what I use primarily with redis.

I don't think memcached is bad, I just think its old and industry has moved to redis because it offers more while covering the previous use case.

Calling redis fiddly is a mischaracterization. For many use cases I have not had to think more than 30s to setup redis.

(also when I say redis I mean Valkey at this point, even if they are starting to diverge)

There's basically zero reason to use redis. Pretty much every rdbms like mariadb, postgres, etc is just as fast. So then why redis? It's basically needless complexity in your system.
Postgres etc are more complex than Redis, are they not?

Does your argument assume you already have a database, so you might as well use it for your cache mechanism?

Security. More precisely, the ability to secure access to redis with a password.