Facebook has released a fork of memcached that significantly improves its performance, allowing it to handle 200,000 UDP requests per second with an average latency of 173 microseconds, compared to the previous 50,000 UDP requests per second using the standard Linux and memcached setup. While the total throughput can reach 300,000 UDP requests per second, the latency at this rate is considered too high for practical use within their system. These enhancements demonstrate a substantial advancement in memcached's scalability and efficiency.