Facebook Opens Up CacheLib As Their New Caching Engine

Facebook last week formally announced CacheLib as their new open-source caching engine designed for web scale services and to make for effective non-volatile memory caching to offset the increasing costs of DRAM.

CacheLib's development was motivated in part by increasing prices around system memory. The Facebook announcement noted, "As traditional dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) caches become more expensive and require more power to scale, companies like Facebook are exploring hardware choices such as non-volatile memory (NVM) drives to augment their caching systems. This DRAM and NVM hybrid model is a step forward, but innovative caching designs are needed to harness the full potential of the hybrid cache."

CacheLib is C++ based and is a pluggable, in-process caching engine. CacheLib is being used now by more than 70 large-scale systems at Facebook from their social graph to CDN.

Those wanting to learn more about this open-source caching engine can read Facebook Engineering's announcement. There is also a project site at Cachelib.org and the Apache 2.0 licensed code is hosted on GitHub.