Twemproxy (pronounced “two-em-proxy”), aka nutcracker is a fast and lightweight proxy for memcached and redis protocol. It was primarily built to reduce the connection count on the backend caching servers.

Build

To build nutcracker from distribution tarball:

$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install
To build nutcracker from distribution tarball in debug mode:

$ CFLAGS=”-ggdb3 -O0″ ./configure –enable-debug=full
$ make
$ sudo make install
To build nutcracker from source with debug logs enabled and assertions disabled:

$ git clone [email protected]:twitter/twemproxy.git
$ cd twemproxy
$ autoreconf -fvi
$ ./configure –enable-debug=log
$ make
$ src/nutcracker -h
Features

Fast.
Lightweight.
Maintains persistent server connections.
Keeps connection count on the backend caching servers low.
Enables pipelining of requests and responses.
Supports proxying to multiple servers.
Supports multiple server pools simultaneously.
Shard data automatically across multiple servers.
Implements the complete memcached ascii and redis protocol.
Easy configuration of server pools through a YAML file.
Supports multiple hashing modes including consistent hashing and distribution.
Can be configured to disable nodes on failures.
Observability through stats exposed on stats monitoring port.