What are Memcached buckets for?

#1

I am new to Couchbase and currently evaluating it as a caching solution. I first tried a Memcached bucket since according to the documentation this seemed to be what I needed. But these kind of buckets do not support replication, persistance and rebalancing. Cause at least replication is very important for my use-case, I have to use Couchbase buckets.

The question is why Memcached buckets exists? What is the advantage in comparison to Couchbase buckets? Faster reading and writing since nothing is persisted or replicated? Or is it just Memcached compatibility?

#2

Having the memcached bucket option sorta kills 2 birds with 1 stone.

  1. The Couchbase SDK is already installed on the application and talks MEMCACHED speak GET(), SET().

  2. You need a “CACHE” bucket with items with TTL’s of a few seconds to 25minutes and you don’t want to manage another set of memcached servers.

I found that using a small “CACHE” bucket for view query results helps out alot. You can do stale=true on the views … but memcached GET() is always faster.

#3

Thanks for the answer. Sounds to me that a memcached bucket is mainly for existing applications that use the memcached API (just to clarify: I don’t know much about memcached, I am a .NET guy usually using AppFabric for caching). When building new applications a Couchbase bucket seems to be the better choice. In terms of performance I cound not find any differences, but my test setup was very easy.