Posts

Showing posts from October, 2010

Thrift for serializing/deserializing objects in Membase

First off, if you haven't heard of Membase , you should check it out. It's an evolution of sorts from memcached . Typically when you use memcache or membase to store/retrieve key-value data, the value part is not a simple datatype. Instead, it would most likely be a serialized representation of some complex application specific data-structure. It's great to set/get complex datastructure with a single remote call like this. But what could become a problem very soon is the performance of the serialize/deserialize operations that needs to happen with set/get operations. With php, the obvious way to do this is to use the language's builtin serialization facility. Since the serialized format is a ASCII based format, I would guess that it's performance is not optimal (especially for deserialization). Also, one would want to do compression to reduce the data transfer and storage costs. This again adds to the set/get operation costs. I'm looking at one such applic