RamCloud vs. Memcached

What?

A side project was started to modify libmemcached 1.0.3 library to add RAMCloud support in the backend.

Why?

The goal of the project was to compare the performance of Memcached vs RAMCloud using the very same apparatus (specifically those developed for Memcached) to give a more "Apples to Apples" comparison.

Setup

Machines:

RC01 - Single Coordinator
RC02 - Single Master (no replication)
RC03 - Memcached Server
RC04 - Memslap machine (and Memcached server for certain tests*)

Parameters:

Single Threaded Test (no multithread support yet, comming soon

Results

Test Specific Parameters

Key Size: 30B
Value Size: 100B
Distinct KV sets/gets: 50,000

System	Write Time (s)	Read Time(s)	Write Latency (us)	Read Latency (us)
Memcached::TCP(RC03)	7.7	7.7	154	154
Memcached::Localhost	1.6984	1.5268	33.968	30.536
Memcached::infrc	4.05	3.6756	81	73.512
RAMCloud::TCP	4.8498	4.9	96.996	98
RAMCloud::infrc	0.353	0.335	7.06	6.7

Summary

System	Write Improvement	Read Improvement
Memcached::Localhost vs RAMCloud::infrc	4.81	4.56
Memcached::infrc vs RAMCloud::infrc	11.47	10.97
Memcached::TCP vs RAMCloud::TCP	1.59	1.57
Memcached::TCP vs RAMCloud::infrc	21.81	22.99

Test Specific Parameters

Key Size: 30B
Value Size: 1000B
Distinct KV sets/gets: 50,000

System	Write Time (s)	Read Time(s)	Write Latency (us)	Read Latency (us)
Memcached::TCP	8.2692	7.856	165.384	157.12
Memcached::Localhost	1.8068	1.5988	36.136	31.976
Memcached::infrc	4.2622	3.9802	85.244	79.604
RAMCloud::TCP	5.5012	5.4708	110.024	109.416
RamCloud::infrc	0.48	0.453	9.6	9.06

Summary

Conclusions	Write Improvement	Read Improvement
Memcached::Localhost vs RAMCloud::infrc	3.76	3.53
Memcached::infrc vs RAMCloud::infrc	8.88	8.79
Memcached::TCP vs RAMCloud::TCP	1.50	1.44
Memcached::TCP vs RAMCloud::infrc	17.23	17.34