Membase, The Database Powering Farmville | Hacker News Reader

Membase, The Database Powering Farmville

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37 pointsmcxx7 comments

What an uninformative article. Basically it resumes to

1. Farmville uses Membase.

2. Membase is related to memcached.

You have to go to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Membase) to find some relevant info (seemingly picked up from marketing materials, though). Such as: they seem to aim for easy installation and management.

I'm curious if other shops are deploying Membase, as it being the backend behind Farmville attaches more negative connotation than positive for me.

My girlfriend has a ludicrous Farmville addiction, and I don't think she's gone more than a few hours at a time without it messing up and loosing whatever she'd just spent the past twenty minutes doing. If that happened to me more than once, I'm pretty sure I'd stop playing that game.

I looked at deploying it very recently, but it has a little bit to go. They guys at Northscale are very responsive and have replicated my issue. I'm hoping they have a solution in the near future.

The admin UI is nice, real time stats are good. It, however is still in the 2nd beta and there are known bugs that need to be fixed to be considered production worthy imo.

I don't like Farmville much, but attaching some sort of negative reaction to Membase because Zynga uses it is pretty silly IMHO.

If anything, I'm impressed that Membase is standing up to the torturous load of all those strawberry harvests and ponies. :)

We're in the middle of doing some testing with it at Loggly, and we've found them exceedingly responsive to our requests.

The specific point that m0nastic just said (and which you seem to have ignored) is that it /doesn't/ stand up to it, with an anecdote that aomeghing glitches up every 20 minutes. Your response makes it sound like it was an ad hominem attack of the form "Zynga is addictive, they use membase, therefore I hate membase due to negative connotaion", as opposed to "Zynga's data seems fail, Zynga uses membase, therefore membase may be suspect as it could be contributing to those failures (making Zynga a weird example to choose)".

It would be interesting to hear about the design of membase. I wonder if someone has a architectural overview somewhere. EDIT: It seems like a article with a little more information is at http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/06/membase

For those on OSX, I just hacked together a homebrew forumla for membase beta 2 yesterday:

http://groups.google.com/group/membase/t/69a47f80a2b772b8

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