Write LRU to database

[Oscar Kené]

Steven Grimm wrote:
> Oscar Kené wrote:
>> Is there any functionality to make it write these to a mySQL-database 
>> instead?
>
> Memcached is typically used to cache data that's already in your 
> database to begin with, in which case this becomes unnecessary; if an 
> object isn't in your cache, you just hit the database instead.
>
> In my opinion it is not a good idea to *only* store data in memcached. 
> Memcached processes can get killed accidentally, your data center can 
> have a power outage, your sysadmins can decide they need to move 
> servers to different racks, your memcached machines can have hardware 
> glitches and spontaneously reboot, etc. (To name some of the things 
> that have happened to our memcached servers.) Even if you modified it 
> to write data somewhere else at expiration time, you would still be 
> vulnerable to the cache getting blown away for whatever reason; you'd 
> lose all the non-expired data.
>
My data isn't really that critical. If lost, no biggie. I just though of 
something that may be of help to others also solving my problem (kind 
of). As I see it it is the SELECTs that is the straining part of my 
operations. So, one could do the INSERTs towards the database and 
memcache while only doing SELECTs towards memcache. Upon memcache 
failure (crashing etc) memcache can read the most recent entries from 
the database and continue operation.
>> Right now my data is INSERTed, SELECTed only once and then DELETEd. 
>> But every "set" of data is not handled sequentially. So one "set" of 
>> data can be INSERTEd but not SELECTed or DELETEd before the entry is 
>> subject to the "LRU-rule". I.e. I want to keep the most recent 
>> "INSERTs" in memcache as they are the most likely to be operated on 
>> first.
>
> If that's generally your usage pattern, then memcached's LRU semantics 
> may not even come into play, assuming you're careful to delete items 
> from the cache after you're done operating on them (which should be 
> fine if you're only reading them once.) Memcached will always reuse 
> space from deleted or expired items before it will evict any valid 
> items from the cache, so you just need to have enough space in your 
> cache to hold your typical backlog of items. If you're constantly 
> reading and deleting the most recent items, then the next items you 
> write will just reuse that space over and over again.
>
> FYI, memcached's expiration policy is not strictly LRU if your cache 
> items are of significantly different sizes; there is a separate LRU 
> queue for each range of sizes computed by the slab allocator. In 
> normal operation that's usually not noticeable, but if you're trying 
> to do something that depends in any way on eviction order, you'll want 
> to be aware of that.
>
> -Steve
Is there any way to control what data is expired? Would be nice to set 
it to strict LRU.