I’m setting up a Django website to use memcached to cache its pages.
(The content of each page won’t change very often at all, so I’m hoping that most of the site will be served from memcached most of the time, and thus be able to handle a lot of traffic reasonably well.)
Both the website and memcached will run on one virtual server, running on Debian Squeeze.
Given that set-up, I thought I might set memcached to listen via a Unix domain socket (see http://code.google.com/p/memcached/wiki/NewConfiguringServer#Unix_Sockets), instead of over a network interface. Although my virtual server is pretty extensively firewalled, as I only need memcached to be to be accessible by a single local user (i.e. the Django site), I figure I might as well keep it restricted.
Are there any drawbacks to having memcached listen over a Unix domain socket, when both memcached and its client are on the same server? E.g. might a Unix domain socket be slower than listening on 127.0.0.1?
(Apologies for such a newbie question — as you can probably tell, I haven’t used memcached before, or done much with Unix/Linux.)
Best Answer
Typically the unix socket versus network port question breaks down like this:
Unix Socket Drawbacks
Can only be accessed localy
Unix Socket Benefits
Eliminates TCP/IP overhead
Network Drawbacks
Security TCP/IP overhead
Network Benefits
Services can be accessed over the network
I use this as a general guide to nearly any service, including memcached, MySQL, and other services.
This is drastically over simplified but is where I start.