We rely heavily on memcache and are serving a few billion requests per month. We have 5 memcache servers. Last night, we saw an 25% increase in our traffic. The graphs show that requests and data transfered by each memcache increased and made them crash. It started a chain reaction and each memcache server crashed one after another (Load per server increased).
We found no logs in syslog, messages, memcache log file (Verbose settings was off).
I have two questions:
How can I find out why exactly this happened. If load is an issue for memcache, is there any documentation on how much a normal memcache (running on decent config) can handle. How can I increase this value.
How can I ensure they never go down again. It eventually impacted our mysql servers and replication and impacted a lot of other related services. Do I need more memcache servers?
I started my memcache using this init.d script: http://pastebin.com/wfMnB4ta where ENABLE_MEMCACHE is YES in /etc/default/memcached
/usr/share/memcached/scripts/start-memcached: http://pastebin.com/LaUugXye
Thanks
memcached
?/usr/share/memcached/scripts/start-memcached
look like?