Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

RocksDB VS memcached

Compare RocksDB VS memcached and see what are their differences

RocksDB logo RocksDB

A persistent key-value store for fast storage environments

memcached logo memcached

High-performance, distributed memory object caching system
  • RocksDB Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-03-12
  • memcached Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-23

RocksDB features and specs

  • High Performance
    RocksDB is designed for high throughput and low latency, making it suitable for performance-intensive applications. It optimizes for fast read and write operations, leveraging the LSM-tree data structure.
  • Rich Feature Set
    Includes advanced features like transactions, column families, data compression, and support for various storage engines, providing flexibility for developers to tailor it to their needs.
  • Scale and Efficiency
    Handles large volumes of data efficiently, making it suitable for applications that require significant scalability. It does this by using efficient memory and disk utilization techniques.
  • Embedded Database
    As an embedded database, it allows applications to integrate storage capabilities directly into their processes, reducing the overhead associated with connecting to a separate database service.
  • Strong Community and Support
    Developed by Facebook, RocksDB has a strong community with extensive documentation, regular updates, and active development, ensuring continuous improvement and support.

Possible disadvantages of RocksDB

  • Complex Configuration and Tuning
    RocksDB is highly configurable, which can be a double-edged sword. Properly tuning parameters for optimal performance can be complex and requires a deep understanding of the internals.
  • Limited SQL Support
    RocksDB is a key-value store and does not support SQL out of the box. This may require additional layers or integration with other systems like MySQL or MariaDB to provide SQL capabilities.
  • Memory Usage
    Performance optimizations often involve significant memory usage, which could be a limitation in environments where memory resources are constrained.
  • Lack of Built-in Replication
    While RocksDB itself does not provide built-in replication capabilities, external tools or custom solutions are necessary to achieve data replication and high availability.
  • Learning Curve
    The complexity and rich feature set of RocksDB come with a steep learning curve, especially for developers unfamiliar with LSM-tree data structures and database internals.

memcached features and specs

  • High Performance
    Memcached is incredibly fast and efficient at caching data in memory, enabling quick data retrieval and reducing the load on databases. Its in-memory nature significantly reduces latency.
  • Scalability
    Memcached can be easily scaled horizontally by adding more nodes to the caching cluster. This allows it to handle increased loads and large datasets without performance degradation.
  • Simplicity
    Memcached has a simple design and API, making it easy to implement and use. Developers can quickly integrate it into their applications without a steep learning curve.
  • Open Source
    Memcached is free and open-source software, which means it can be used and modified without any licensing fees. This makes it a cost-effective solution for caching.
  • Language Agnostic
    Memcached supports multiple programming languages through various client libraries, making it versatile and suitable for use in diverse tech stacks.

Possible disadvantages of memcached

  • Data Volatility
    Memcached stores data in RAM, so all cached data is lost if the server is restarted or crashes. This makes it unsuitable for storing critical or persistent data.
  • Limited Data Types
    Memcached primarily supports simple key-value pairs. It lacks the rich data types and more complex structures supported by some other caching solutions like Redis.
  • No Persistence
    Memcached does not offer any data persistence features. It cannot save data to disk, so all information is ephemeral and will be lost on system reset.
  • Size Limitation
    Memcached has a memory limit for each instance, thus, large-scale applications may need to manage multiple instances and ensure data is properly distributed.
  • Security
    Memcached does not provide built-in security features such as authentication or encryption. This can be a concern in environments where data privacy and security are critical.

RocksDB videos

How Online Backup works in MyRocks and RocksDB

More videos:

  • Review - RocksDB Meetup 2020 at Rockset
  • Review - TokuDB vs RocksDB

memcached videos

Course Preview: Using Memcached and Varnish to Speed Up Your Linux Web App

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to RocksDB and memcached)
Databases
14 14%
86% 86
NoSQL Databases
13 13%
87% 87
Key-Value Database
11 11%
89% 89
Graph Databases
17 17%
83% 83

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare RocksDB and memcached

RocksDB Reviews

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memcached Reviews

Redis vs. KeyDB vs. Dragonfly vs. Skytable | Hacker News
Quick ask: I don’t see “some” of the other offering out there like MemCached… what was the criteria used to select these? I don’t see any source of how the test where run, specs of the systems, how the DB where set up, etc. Would be very valuable to have in order to attempt to re-validate these test on our own platform. I also came back and saw some of your updates...
Memcached vs Redis - More Different Than You Would Expect
So knowing how the difference between Redis and memcached in-memory usage, lets see what this means. Memcached slabs once assigned never change their size. This means it is possible to poison your memcached cluster and really waste memory. If you load your empty memcached cluster with lots of 1 MB items, then all of the slabs will be allocated to that size. Adding a 80 KB...
Redis vs. Memcached: In-Memory Data Storage Systems
Memcached itself does not support distributed mode. You can only achieve the distributed storage of Memcached on the client side through distributed algorithms such as Consistent Hash. The figure below demonstrates the distributed storage implementation schema of Memcached. Before the client side sends data to the Memcached cluster, it first calculates the target node of the...
Source: medium.com
Why Redis beats Memcached for caching
Both Memcached and Redis are mature and hugely popular open source projects. Memcached was originally developed by Brad Fitzpatrick in 2003 for the LiveJournal website. Since then, Memcached has been rewritten in C (the original implementation was in Perl) and put in the public domain, where it has become a cornerstone of modern Web applications. Current development of...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, memcached should be more popular than RocksDB. It has been mentiond 36 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

RocksDB mentions (13)

  • Introducing Gridstore: Qdrant's Custom Key-Value Store
    When we started building Qdrant, we needed to pick something ready for the task. So we chose RocksDB as our embedded key-value store. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • The Home Server Journey - 4: Enter The Matrix
    One thing you should know is that the K8s architecture is optimized for stateless applications, which don't store changing information within themselves and whose output depend solely on input from the user or auxiliary processes. Conduit, on the contrary, is tightly coupled with its high-performance database, RocksDB, and has stateful behavior. That's why we need to take extra care by not replicating our process... - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • How to choose the right type of database
    RocksDB: A high-performance embedded database optimized for multi-core CPUs and fast storage like SSDs. Its use of a log-structured merge-tree (LSM tree) makes it suitable for applications requiring high throughput and efficient storage, such as streaming data processing. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Fast persistent recoverable log and key-value store
    [RocksDB](https://rocksdb.org/) isn’t a distributed storage system, fwiw. It’s an embedded KV engine similar to LevelDB, LMDB, or really sqlite (though that’s full SQL, not just KV). - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
  • The Hallucinated Rows Incident
    To output the top 3 rocks, our engine has to first store all the rocks in some sorted way. To do this, we of course picked RocksDB, an embedded lexicographically sorted key-value store, which acts as the sorting operation's persistent state. In our RocksDB state, the diffs are keyed by the value of weight, and since RocksDB is sorted, our stored diffs are automatically sorted by their weight. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
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memcached mentions (36)

  • MySQL Performance Tuning Techniques
    Memcached can help when lightning-fast performance is needed. These tools store frequently accessed data, such as session details, API responses, or product prices, in RAM. This reduces the laid on your primary database, so you can deliver microsecond response times. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • 10 Best Practices for API Rate Limiting in 2025
    In-memory tools like Redis or Memcached for fast Data retrieval. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Outgrowing Postgres: Handling increased user concurrency
    A caching layer using popular in-memory databases like Redis or Memcached can go a long way in addressing Postgres connection overload issues by being able to handle a much larger concurrent request load. Adding a cache lets you serve frequent reads from memory instead, taking pressure off Postgres. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • API Caching: Techniques for Better Performance
    Memcached — Free and well-known for its simplicity, Memcached is a distributed and powerful memory object caching system. It uses key-value pairs to store small data chunks from database calls, API calls, and page rendering. It is available on Windows. Strings are the only supported data type. Its client-server architecture distributes the cache logic, with half of the logic implemented on the server and the other... - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • story of upgrading rails 5.x to 7.x
    The app depends on several packages to run, so I need to install them locally too. I used a combination of brew and orbstack / docker for installing packages. Some dependencies for this project are redis, mongodb and memcache. - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing RocksDB and memcached, you can also consider the following products

Redis - Redis is an open source in-memory data structure project implementing a distributed, in-memory key-value database with optional durability.

MongoDB - MongoDB (from "humongous") is a scalable, high-performance NoSQL database.

Aerospike - Aerospike is a high-performing NoSQL database supporting high transaction volumes with low latency.

Pivotal GemFire - Pivotal GemFire® is a real-time distributed data store that solves the hard problems of...

Apache Cassandra - The Apache Cassandra database is the right choice when you need scalability and high availability without compromising performance.

KeyDB - KeyDB is fast NoSQL database with full compatibility for Redis APIs, clients, and modules.