Can RDMA benefit online data processing workloads on memcached and MySQL?

Abstract

At the onset of the widespread usage of social networking services in the Web 2.0/3.0 era, leveraging a distributed and scalable caching layer like Memcached is often invaluable to application server performance. Since a majority of the existing clusters today are equipped with modern high speed interconnects such as InfiniBand, that offer high bandwidth and low latency communication, there is potential to improve the response time and throughput of the application servers, by taking advantage of advanced features like RDMA. We explore the potential of employing RDMA to improve the performance of Online Data Processing (OLDP) workloads on MySQL using Memcached for real-world web applications.