I needed to clear a cache entry from a memcached cluster of 5 instances. Since I didn't know which one the client had put it in, I concocted a command line cache entry purger. netcat AKA nc(1) is my friend.
Let's say the cache key is "shard:7517" and the memcached instances are running on hosts ghcache01, ghcache02, ghcache03, ghcache04 and ghcache05 on port 11111 the incantation to spray them all with a delete command is
$ for i in 1 2 3 4 5 > do echo $i && echo -e "delete shard:7517\r\nquit\r\n" | nc -i1 ghcache0$i 11111 > doneand the output looks like
1 NOT_FOUND 2 DELETED 3 NOT_FOUND 4 NOT_FOUND 5 NOT_FOUNDwhich indicates that the memcached instance on ghcache02 had the key and deleted it (note the memcached protocol response: DELETED), the rest didn't have it and returned NOT_FOUND.
For more information on the memcached protocol, see the docs under source control.
( Oct 26 2007, 12:29:37 PM PDT ) Permalink