1sockchuck writes "Facebook now has 140 million users, and in recent weeks has been adding 600,000 new users a day. To keep pace with that growth, the Facebook engineering team has been tweaking its use of memcached, and says it can now handle 200,000 UDP requests per second. Facebook has detailed its refinements to memcached, which it hopes will be included in the official memcached repository. For now, their changes have been released to github."

Amazon has announced several major improvements to its EC2 service for cloud computing. The service is now in production (no longer beta); it offers a service-level agreement; and Windows and SQL Server are available in beta form. ZDNet points out that all this news is intended to take some wind out of Microsoft's sails as MS is expected to introduce its own cloud services next week at its Professional Developers Conference.