If you are a hacker building a distributed system, drop what you are doing and go play with Tokyo Tyrant. I haven't been this excited about something since I first played with rails
I am serious, stop reading, start compiling.
ps: The tokyocabinet in macports is antique, build your own. Tokyo
Tyrant needs lua to be installed in /usr/local, annoying, but
survivable until patched to have a --with-lua.