Scott Johnson sent me a link to a presentation (PDF) the guys from LiveJournal gave at a Linux conference last year. (As you might imagine, scale is one thing LiveJournal has to monitor closely)
Part of the architecture uses memcached, a server-based object cache built by Danga (guys who run LiveJournal). The object cache helps reduce the number of queries made to the DB, which helps the site to remain speedy as the number of visitors increase. (Here's a good article about it)
I learned to my dismay that memcached does not run on Win32 platforms due to some issues with libevent and memcached. After quite a bit of searching, I was ready to call it a night and started thinking about some of the vendors I had looked at the other day. I decided to troll the memcached email list and lo and behold, a kind soul (Kronuz) had figured out the issues *and* posted binaries for both libevent and memcached. I quickly downloaded them and wrote a simple test client in Java. Firing up memcached was straightforward as was running my test client.
Ah, the sweet smell of victory