New (experimental) C (and PHP) memcached library

[Alex Stapleton]

It uses a consistent hashing library that the guys from last.fm  
released a week or two ago so hashes should stay the same. If a  
server fails while the program is executing it should mark it as dead  
and stop using it but I haven't tested this very well. However there  
is no way to mark a server as dead currently so it will continue to  
attempt connections on every new page due to some restrictions in  
libketama which I need to fix :)

Alex Stapleton
alexs at advfn.com
T: 0207 0700 956


On 29 Apr 2007, at 05:04, Don MacAskill wrote:

>
> Very cool.  Can't wait to take a look.
>
> Does your library support the idea of server state?  In other  
> words, if a server crashes or is otherwise marked offline (but is  
> planned to return, so not removed from the list), does the hashing  
> still stay consistent?
>
> Ideally, we don't want items to get re-hashed to a new server  
> (unless, of course, the server is permanently removed from the  
> pool) because then there's the chance for stale cache reads in the  
> future.  Instead, we want the hashing to take the same # of servers  
> into account, but for the client to simply not attempt reads/writes  
> to servers marked "down".
>
> The PECL extension added similar functionality in 2.1.0, and I  
> believe it's fairly common practice.
>
>
> Alex Stapleton wrote:
>> Well I mentioned I had written a UDP capable C library for working  
>> with memcached a couple of days ago and here it is. It requires  
>> libketama, libevent and uses Boost.Build currently. Included is a  
>> PHP library that provides access to it, and pretty much zero  
>> documentation. There is a fairly comprehensive example program and  
>> a test PHP script as well. It works pretty well but has not been  
>> tested in any sort of failure scenario yet.
>> libevent: http://www.monkey.org/~provos/libevent/
>> libketama: http://www.last.fm/user/RJ/journal/2007/04/10/392555/
>> Here's the README with more info
>> =======
>> cmemcache - C memcached client
>>         authors: Alex Stapleton <alex.stapleton at gmail.com>
>>         version: 0.5 - Dedicated to Varablese, the Greek God of  
>> uncertainty.
>>         date: 28 Apr 2007
>> This is the first revision of this client, it seems to mostly work  
>> and valgrind
>> doesn't report any massive memory issues with it. *crosses  
>> fingers* This is
>> probably usable. It supports TCP and UDP and relies on libketama,  
>> libevent and
>> Bost.Build. Links to dependencies are down below. Currently it is  
>> assumed all
>> servers are operating in both UDP and TCP mode with the UDP port 1  
>> higher than
>> the TCP port listed in the ketama server file. This is a lame hack  
>> I know.
>> It should be pretty easy to add support to force a server to only  
>> do TCP though.
>> The PHP module has been tested under PHP4 and PHP5. This extension  
>> has not
>> been used in a high load situation yet. Proper QA and bugfixing  
>> has not
>> been done. This is going to be happening over the next week or two  
>> as we
>> roll it out onto our web servers.
>> Get requests are sent aynchronously using libevent which means you  
>> get pretty
>> good performance using large numbers of servers for batch requests.
>> I am almost certain there are horrendously evil bugs in this code.  
>> If anything
>> breaks and loses your customers or sets your parents on fire, it's  
>> not my fault.
>> =======
>> You can only get it from SVN right now the repo is at
>> svn checkout http://cmemcache.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ cmemcache
>> Just type bjam to build it (assuming you have Boost.Build v2  
>> installed.)
>> I'd appreciate any feedback (especially in the form of patches ;)  
>> no matter how scathing.
>> Alex Stapleton
>> alexs at advfn.com