Facebook open sources McRouter tool

Social network Facebook today said it would open source the McRouter (memcached protocol router) software it uses to speed up web server access to database back-ends.

Facebook Engineering said it originally built McRouter to make Memcached more flexible and scale to its MySQL database and web server clusters. 

The scalability comes from the ability to allow working data datasets grow beyond individual Memcached servers and be served between several different servers through an algorithm that segments the cached information and splits it into different pools.

McRouter was developed in C and C++ and is licensed under the liberal BSD license. It supports any caching program that follows the Memcached protocols.

Memcached itself is an open source distributed in-memory object caching system aimed at storing small amounts of arbitrary data such as application programming interfaces and database calls.

Although McRouter was written for Facebook's internal use, it has been adopted by Instagram, as well internet forum Reddit.

At Facebook and Instagram, McRouter is claimed to manage close to five billion requests during peak usage times.

The source code for McRouter can be found on Github.

Read iTnews's Labs guide to five zero-cost ways to improve the performance of MySQL.