# facebook/mcrouter

Mcrouter is a memcached protocol router for scaling memcached deployments.

Repository: https://github.com/facebook/mcrouter
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/mcrouter
Language: C++
License: MIT
License Family: permissive
Last push: 2026-08-25T12:56:07+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 67/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-02T17:46:02.011165+00:00)
- activity 99, release rhythm 8, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 4604, "days_push": 8, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: none
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 3334, forks 554 (observed 2026-08-28T04:07:56.705449+00:00)

## What it is
Mcrouter is a memcached protocol router developed by Facebook for scaling memcached deployments, handling nearly 5 billion requests per second at peak in production. It provides flexible routing, sharding, replication, failover, and multi-cluster support while speaking the memcached ASCII protocol.

## Use cases
- scale memcached across many servers
- route cache requests by key prefix
- add automatic failover to a memcached fleet
- shadow production traffic to test a new cache tier
- set up multi-level caches with warm-up
- run a multi-cluster memcached setup
- broadcast cache invalidations reliably

## When to choose
- you run memcached at large scale and need sharding, replication, or failover
- you need prefix routing or multi-cluster cache topologies
- you want battle-tested infrastructure proven at Facebook/Instagram scale

## When to avoid
- you use Redis or another cache instead of memcached
- you have only one or two memcached servers and simple needs
- you need a managed solution rather than self-operated C++ software
- you need Windows or macOS support - it targets Linux

## Facets
- artifact type: service
- maturity: stable
- function: caching, proxy, routing, networking
- domain: databases, infrastructure-as-code, microservices, performance, self-hosted
- platform: cpp, cli
- tags: memcached, cache-router, facebook, sharding, failover, connection-pooling, linux, web-server

## Member repositories
- facebook/mcrouter (main) score 67

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:07:56.705449+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-29T18:41:27.143704+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/facebook/mcrouter (fetched 2026-08-28T04:07:56.705449+00:00, sha 167f07e2d5cb)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.