memcache vs database

[Massimo Di Pierro]

Interesting read...

http://fupeg.blogspot.com/2008/08/cache-money.html

I wish there were data supporting this point of view or the opposite.

Massimo

[Timbo]

It really seems apples vs. oranges to me.

Facebook needs memcache for the obvious reason that it's pages are
highly complex and include many pictures. Moving the cache back to
MySQL makes little sense since it will still have to build all those
pages which would otherwise be in memcache. Also, fewer of Facebooks
pages are time-critical when compared to eBay. On eBay you basically
can't cache a page rendering (memcache) if it has less than a minute
of auction time left, but the MySQL cache makes perfect sense since
the pages remain dynamic even though things are changing under heavy
load in real-time.

It would be interesting to see numbers though.