Last days I worked setting up a new web serving structure for Wine, the largest wine’s e-commerce in Latin America. After testing, studying and learning a lot, we built a nice solution based on nginx and memcached. I will use a picture to describe the architecture (sorry, I’m not so good with pictures =P):

As you can see, when a client do a request to the nginx server, it first checks on memcached if the response is already cached. If the response was not found on cache server, then nginx forward the request to Tomcat, which process the request, cache the response on memcached and returns it to nginx. Tomcat works only for the first client, and all other clients requesting the same resource will get the cached response on RAM. My objective with this post is to show how we built this architecture. Continue Reading »