At 3:17 AM on a Tuesday in Q3 2024, our p99 API latency hit 4.8 seconds, cache miss rate spiked to 38%, and our on-call engineer was ready to quit. We’d been running Memcached 1.6 as our primary cache for 7 years—this was the breaking point. Three months later, after migrating to Redis 7.2 with a custom sharding layer, our cache miss rate dropped to 15.2%, p99 latency fell to 280ms, and we saved $22,000 per month in unnecessary EC2 and RDS overprovisioning. This is the unvarnished story of how we did it, with every benchmark, code snippet, and mistake included.

📡 Hacker News Top Stories Right Now

Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930 (235 points)

Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal (819 points)

Mo RAM, Mo Problems (2025) (78 points)

San Francisco, AI capital of the world, is an economic laggard (9 points)

Pgrx: Build Postgres Extensions with Rust (21 points)

Key Insights

Cache miss rate dropped from 38% to 15.2% (60% relative reduction) after migration, with…