summary of misc off-list traffic

[Brad Fitzpatrick]

Uriah Welcome is looking at using memcached for SourceForge.net, so he
started working on a Python API, but without multiple servers.  Evan (at
danga) then ported the Perl one to Python, and he's cleaning it up now.
I'll put it up and announce it when it's ready.

Somebody asked about porting memcached to Windows, but we don't see the
point:  paying for a Windows license for each box?  Ouch!  But, I guess if
you're just sticking memcache on existing Windows web nodes, and you're
already paying for the license, then it'd work.  (that is recommended,
btw:  take your existing web nodes, add more memory, and also run
memcached on them.... memcached takes almost no CPU.)  In any case, if you
want to run memcached on Windows, port it, then send us patches and we'll
integrate them.

Avva (works for Danga and wrote most of memcached server) is working on
making object expirations happen as soon as possible, instead of falling
off the LRU, or being killed on retrieve.  Currently it's possible for an
object with a lifetime of 30 seconds to live in memory for hours, as long
as nobody accesses it.  If somebody does access it 31 seconds later, or an
hour later, its expiration time is noted and it's then destroyed, and the
client gets an empty result, but it was still in memory longer than it
needed to be, so it was probably pushing other objects with infinite
expiration times off the LRU.  So, the early expiration patch will
increase hit rates a little.  Probably a tiny amount, but it really
depends on what you're throwing in memcache.


Don't be afraid to use the list.  Everybody I've talked to off-list has
been smart, friendly, and had good questions/advice.

- Brad