Improve performance of machine translation service using memcached

Sampark is machine translation system providing translations among nine pairs of Indian languages. Machine translation system is a class of natural language processing applications that is far more complex and highly compute intensive in nature. As the load on the deployed system increases, optimization becomes a challenge. Caching is one of the available options to improve the performance of a software system with increasing load which exhibit the characteristics of locality of reference. Sampark MT system being a natural language processing application exhibits this characteristic. Memcached is a well-known, simple, in-memory caching solution that has been applied to improve the performance of several distributed web applications in the past. This paper describes how memcached has been applied to improve the performance of Sampark machine translation service which is deployed on a large cluster of machines. By applying distributed caching to MT system the performance of the system has improved upto 40%.