PECL memcache extension

[Joshua Thijssen]

> Yeah, that's an issue.  When you've got, say, 50 memcache servers,
> though, and one fails, you're only getting 1/50th of those queries
> passed to the DB.  So it's not (at least, for us) that big of a deal.
> 49/50 queries to memcache is still nice.

Isn't it to prioritize the a key?

I'm not sure if memcached knows if a bucket is not available anymore.

Suppose machine A breaks and had key X with value 1. Another query would
 place the same key X onto server B with a higher priority and a
mandatory small timeout. This will trigger the DB more often, but takes
care of the key after expiration (I'm not sure of the key expiration is
checked on quering, or that an internal process just scans all keys for
expiry), even if the key is set not to expire.

To take care of coming back online of machine A:
Machine A comes back up, and a query is made to key X. Memcache sees
that there is a key inside 2 different buckets (is this possible?),
collects the one with the highest priority, internally updates all keys
inside the other (still online) bucket(s) with the new value.

The mandatory timeout could even be left out, since a query known that
it's grabbing "slave"-data, and it could delete the complete key after
syncing the master key on machine A.

I think this would take care of unsynced data and obsolete (slave) data.

Gr,
Joshua