CyberCache Cluster by CyberHULL

CyberCache Cluster is a high-performance key/value store designed to be used as Magento session store and cache back-end in high-load applications. Its architecture pursued two main goals:

• to fully utilize all CPU cores available in modern servers by performing not only store/load requests (coming from different sources), but also all maintenance tasks concurrently,

• to match Zend cache API as closely as possible to minimize any overhead.

In addition to the above, CyberCache is a web-centric server; so for instance:

• one of its stores is a session store fully aware of session data flows and supporting internal session locks preventing data corruption,

• it is user agent-aware and gives different data sources different priorities,

• it comes with native-code PHP extension (supporting PHP 7.0..7.3) guaranteeing most efficient data exchange with site code,

• it supports eight compressors; some of them (e.g. Brotli) were specially designed to perform best on web page data (CyberCache's internal optimizers constantly check stores and re-compress data to free up space and also make subsequent data load requests more efficient),

• it is shipped with cybercachewarmer utility that can be used to warm up cache servicing a magento site, as well as for a web site profiling,

• it supports replication (master/slave/both), binlogs (that can be played back), monitoring and control via specialized console app, more than 100 configuration options, on-the-fly configuration w/o server restart, saving and loading data stores, etc. etc. etc., you name it.

An overwiew of CyberCache features and architecture can be found in doc/whitepaper/whitepaper.md file. Once CyberCache is installed, one can get help by executing man cybercached (server configuration), man cybercache (console; it also has extensive internal help), and man cybercachewarmer.

How Can CyberCache Be Useful To You?

First of all, CyberCache is free software distributed under GPL license, so you can utilize it and/or its components and source code [almost] any way you want. For instance:

• CyberCache can be used as highly efficient Magento session store and cache, especially suitable for big sites with, say, 50,000+ products.

• You can adapt CyberCache for any PHP-based framework or CMS having Zend framework as its core.

• C/C++ developers may benefit from various tools and techniques found in the source code; many solutions used during implementation are original.

As to the last item: as of the time of this writing, number of source code lines of the CyberCache Cluster project is 44,493 -- this does not include third- party libraries, as well as most scripts; so there's plenty of stuff, it was being developed over the course of three years, after all. What kind of stuff it is? Well, few examples:

• Many high-performance servers (e.g. nginx) use readily available networking libraries; one of the most popular is libevent. CyberCache contains networking support that was developed from scratch.

• CyberCache console does not use GNU readline library; instead, it has its own readline counterpart developed from scratch.

• Overall CyberCache architecture is based on queues and message exchange similar in concept to those found in Go programming language; in fact, Go was considered as potential implementation language early on. What we have in CyberCache now are Go-like queues and messaging system without Go.

  By the way, this is the main reason of why it is possible to confire the server on the fly w/o restarting it; almost all of its 100+ options (all but select few, maily those having to do with security) can be configured this way: even TCP data port, even queue sizes... Whatever the server is doing, it does not have to stop to change compression algorithm set, or process a request to save or load entire store, or do a health check, etc.

• Quite a few synchronization primitives were developed for CyberCache in the spirit of so-called lock-free programming; atomics were used whenever possible, and when waiting was inevitable, futexes (the most efficient system-level primitives available in Linux) were used for that.

If you do find CyberCache useful (in any way), please drop us a line: cybercache@cyberhull.com.

The CyberHULL Team.