Flashcache 3.0 released by Facebook to enhance SSD

Flashcache is a highly open-source (GPL2) regarded software developed by Facebook which aim to reduce the wear of SSD disks while simultaneously enhance the performance. Now, Facebook has released Flashcache 3.0 to the public.

Facebook clearly deals with massive amounts of data in every given instance. During the past few years, Facebook has gradually migrated to SSDs in favor of the conventional mechanical disks. The enhanced read/write performance of SSDs, in particular when it comes to seek times during random events, results in significantly faster user-content serving, something which obviously enhances the user experiences. However, while SSDs offer excellent performance, the inherent nature of the underlying flash memory technology means that each module can only be written to a finite number of times before it malfunctions.

For the purpose of extending the lifetimes of SSDs, Facebook has developed the software called Flashcache. Flashcache is developed under the GPL v2 open-source license and now Facebook has released Flashcache 3.0. The purpose of Flashcache is to use more intelligence to decide upon when write-processes are to be performed, and minimize such processes while preventing data loss from interruptions. In addition, the caching algorithm in Flashcache also results in generally higher performance for the users. 

For reference, Flashcache is only one of many open-source projects by Facebook, with another good example being the virtual machine for php-code called HipHop.