Memcached Consulting & Support for Enterprises

Cache tier sizing and slab configuration, client sharding and connection pooling design, performance tuning, security hardening, migration planning, and ongoing managed operations. Every engagement is staffed by a named senior engineer who has run Memcached in production, not a generalist reading the man page alongside you.

For most new builds, Redis is the better default: you get persistence, replication, richer data structures, and a much larger ecosystem. Memcached still wins in a narrow but real case — a pure LRU cache of opaque blobs at high concurrency, where its multi-threaded architecture and lower per-item memory overhead give you more cache per dollar. We will tell you which case you are in rather than pushing whichever is a bigger project.

Almost always slab imbalance. Memcached allocates memory into fixed slab classes by item size, and once memory is assigned to a class it is not automatically returned. If your item-size distribution shifted, one slab class starves and evicts while others hold free chunks. We diagnose it from stats slabs and stats items, then fix it with slab automove, growth factor changes, or a controlled restart with corrected sizing.

Yes. We work across self-managed Memcached and ElastiCache for Memcached, including migrations in both directions. ElastiCache removes patching and node replacement work but gives you less control over slab tuning and startup flags — we help you weigh that against your operational capacity honestly.

We warm the new tier before cutover using dual writes or a shadow-read path, validate hit ratio against production traffic while the old tier still serves, then shift traffic in stages with a rollback path. The point is that origin load never exceeds the headroom your database actually has.

Only on a private network with UDP disabled and access controls in place. Memcached's UDP interface was the vector for very large reflection and amplification attacks, and older builds shipped with it enabled. Our health check verifies interface binding, UDP status, SASL authentication, and security group or firewall scope on every node.