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When you are on the bleeding edge of scale like Facebook is, you run into some interesting problems. As of 2008 Facebook had over 800 memcached servers supplying over 28 terabytes of cache. With those staggering numbers it's a fair bet to think they've seen their share of Dr. House worthy memcached problems.
Jeff Rothschild, Vice President of Technology at Facebook, describes one such problem they've dubbed the Multiget Hole.
You fall into the multiget hole when memcached servers are CPU bound, adding more memcached servers seems like the right way to add more capacity so more requests can be served, but against all logic adding servers doesn't help serve more requests. This puts you in a hole that adding more servers can't dig you out of. What's the treatment?
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