memcached in freebsd

[Anatoly Vorobey]

Brion Vibber wrote on Sun, Aug 10, 2003 at 02:42:38AM -0700:
> On further investigation, I note two things:
> 
> a) The "_load_items(): Failed to recieve valid header!" is what I get
> anytime I ask for data that isn't available, and seems to be normal.

Well, if some data you asked for isn't available, it's _not_ an error,
and you don't fail to receive a valid header, so something strange is
going on. A cursory look at the client's source (I don't really know any
PHP) seems to indicate that the client makes some unwarranted 
assumptions. I _think_ it only recognises the "END\r\n" line which 
finishes any batch of data a server sends when this line comes in the 
same buffer (as a result of the same read call) with some previous data
for some key. As a result, when the server fails to match any keys, and
only sends "END\r\n" (correctly, according to the protocol), the client
thinks it's an error. This by itself may be harmless, but I think that 
more serious errors could occur if the "END\r\n" doesn't come in the 
same IP packet as the rest of server's reply (say if the reply is too 
large to fit in one packet) and subsequently arrives via a separate
read request. This logic should be fixed (there shouldn't be any
assumptions about how data is separated across read/write calls). 

> D'oh! Looks like relative expiration times are a new feature of
> 1.1.7/1.1.8, and 1.1.6 expects either 0 or a full Unix timestamp. 

That's correct (don't use 1.1.7, it has an embarrassing bug related to 
this very feature).

--avva