clog

I’ve actually had CachedModel/Memcached running for quite some time, but I didn’t notice that it stopped automatically working for simple calls when Rails 1.2 came out. At the time we were just ramping up with our new dev team and the other Rails sites I had done were nearing the end of their useful life-span. So database load was low in general, a perfect time for Rails 1.2 to sneak one in on me.

Thanks to a combination of successful product launches and ever more dynamic websites (allowing for an ever decreasing amount of cacheable material) our main database server began to become stressed. Finally I noticed that memcached was in fact not caching much at all. After looking into it, I found this ticket describing the problem and (fortunately) a fix.

Once I fixed the problem (and one of the other devs added some key fragment caching) the load went down almost 90%!! It’s ironic that it took CachedModel breaking for me to be reminded just how great it is.

If you want to try it, follow this tutorial for setting up CachedModel. It’s still fairly relevant.

There’s a fancy new Acts as Cached plugin available that also abstracts memcached and may be any better.

If you’re running high-capacity sites, some type of memcached interface is a must-have!!