memcached seems unable to return values on "get" but can "delete"

[Gabe Schine]

hey there,

so we have a single memcached installation serving about five  
servers. it has been working great, however:

certain types of data, usually blobs of about 6k in size, seem to get  
"lost" or something. we store the value with 30 min timeout and a  
flags value of "8", and subsequent gets just return "END", no value.  
HOWEVER, what's odd is, I can contact the memcached server and tell  
it to "delete" that key, and that succeeds, leading subsequent  
deletes to return "NOT_FOUND", so i'm thinking memcached finds the  
data only when i want to delete it.

other data, usually ~600 bytes, seems to work fine. there are two  
differences between data A (doesn't work) and B (works):

1) the keys for A are formatted like this:

		Mind.1:-73828371281

	whereas for B they are something like:
		xxx:1234567890ABCD

and 2) data B has an infinite timeout (value of 0) instead of the  
usual 30 mins

lastly, if i try to "set" a value using the perl memcached client, i  
always get back "SERVER_ERROR: Out of memory" even though i KNOW the  
server isn't out of memory, and our Java production install client  
seems to be able to set keys just fine (barring the above anomaly).  
i'm at the end of my rope here and am just scraping the floor for  
ideas -- anything at all would be hugely appreciated!

thanks very much,

gabe