15.6.2.7. memcached Thread Support

If you enable the thread implementation within when building memcached from source, then memcached uses multiple threads in addition to the libevent system to handle requests.

When enabled, the threading implementation operates as follows:

Threading is handled by wrapping functions within the code to provide basic protection from updating the same global structures at the same time.
Each thread uses its own instance of the libevent to help improve performance.
TCP/IP connections are handled with a single thread listening on the TCP/IP socket. Each connection is then distributed to one of the active threads on a simple round-robin basis. Each connection then operates solely within this thread while the connection remains open.
For UDP connections, all the threads listen to a single UDP socket for incoming requests. Threads that are not currently dealing with another request ignore the incoming packet. One of the remaining, nonbusy, threads reads the request and sends the response. This implementation can lead to increased CPU load as threads wake from sleep to potentially process the request.

Using threads can increase the performance on servers that have multiple CPU cores available, as the requests to update the hash table can be spread between the individual threads. To minimize overhead from the locking mechanism employed, experiment with different thread values to achieve the best performance based on the number and type of requests within your given workload.