# twitter/pelikan

Pelikan is Twitter's unified cache backend

Repository: https://github.com/twitter/pelikan
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/pelikan
Language: C
License: Apache-2.0
License Family: permissive
Last push: 2023-10-11T12:10:54+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 23/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 0, release rhythm 8, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 4000, "days_push": 1057, "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 1957, forks 169 (observed 2026-08-28T04:05:59.148672+00:00)

## What it is
Pelikan is Twitter's framework for building high-performance cache services, written in Rust with a legacy C codebase. It includes products like Segcache, a Memcached-compatible server with high memory efficiency and predictable low latency.

## Use cases
- run a memcached-compatible cache server with better memory efficiency
- deploy a low-latency caching backend at large scale
- build a custom cache service on a modular framework
- proxy memcache clients to Momento
- measure baseline RPC performance with a ping server

## When to choose
- you need a high-throughput, low-latency cache backend for large-scale deployment
- you want extremely memory-efficient caching like Segcache
- you are developing new caching protocols or services and want reusable components

## When to avoid
- you need a general-purpose database with persistence
- you want a turnkey managed cache without operating servers
- you rely on the legacy C codebase for new production deployments

## Facets
- artifact type: service
- maturity: active
- function: caching, http-server, benchmarking
- domain: databases, infrastructure-as-code, performance, developer-tools
- platform: rust, cpp
- tags: memcached-compatible, cache-server, segcache, low-latency, twitter, linux, macos

## Member repositories
- twitter/pelikan (main) score 23

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:05:59.148672+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 2026-08-30T03:06:12.612563+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/twitter/pelikan (fetched 2026-08-28T04:05:59.148672+00:00, sha cab5d884ec19)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.