What are memcached threads?
Threads rule! Thanks to Steven Grimm and Facebook, memcached 1.2 and higher has a threaded operation mode. The threaded system allows memcached to utilize more than a single CPU and share the cache between all of them. It does this by having a very simple locking mechanism when certain values, items, etc need to be updated. This helps make multi gets more efficient, versus running multiple nodes on the same physical server to achieve performance. If you don’t have a heavily loaded setup, you probably don’t need to configure threads. If you’re running a gigantic website with gigantic hardware, you might see benefit here. More info: http://code.sixapart.com/svn/memcached/trunk/server/doc/threads.txt In short summary: command parsing (where memcached spends most of its time) is ran under multiple threads. Operating on the cache internals are under global locks (and thus that time is not threaded). Future improvements in the threading system should remove more global locks and further impr
