Expiration Behavior

[Jason Edgecombe]

Gavin M. Roy wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Am running memcached in production on a fairly large site and am 
> noticing that while I'm putting in expirations, the size of the 
> utilization is growing disproportionately with the expected growth of 
> the cache based upon what we implemented it for.  By some testing, it 
> seems that items that are expired from the cache are only removed when 
> the get request is sent.  Is our interpretation of this behavior 
> correct, or does content in the cache expire based upon the timestamp 
> through some internal stack?  If it's the later how often does the 
> daemon run through to get rid of expired content?
>
> TIA,
>
> Gavin
Hi Gavin,

That is correct. expired items are only purged when a get request is 
sent for the expired item or the expired item is cleared because the 
storage is needed.

Jason