Chanel’s Blog

If you installed Memcached using Yum under the RedHat flavor of Linux, they have this really nice init.d scripts for starting and stopping Memcache. I modified it in order to support creating a bunch memcache instances using contiguous ports. What’s great is that only the “start” script has to be modified since the “stop” script uses a special RedHat function, killproc, which can accept a program name or path and kill all instances of that program. I’m still a noob at bash scripts but here is my only changes:

NUMBUCKETS=3 #only new value needed
start() {
    for ((i=1;i<=$NUMBUCKETS;i+=1)); do
        FULLPORT=${PORT}${i}
        echo -n $"Starting $FULLPORT ($prog): \n"
        daemon $prog -d -p $FULLPORT -u $USER -c $MAXCONN -m $CACHESIZE $OPTIONS
        RETVAL=$?
    done
    echo
    [ $RETVAL -eq 0 ] && touch /var/lock/subsys/$prog
    return $RETVAL
}

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Memcached is a wonderful tool to offload database calls by storing the needed information in cache. One trick I’ve been using to increase productivity is that whenever I know I will be using complex or long running queries, I use a local instance of Memcached to cache the initial database calls. As I debug the output or tweak the logic, the average runtime of the script stays almost constant because the bulk of the processing, database calls, has been cached.

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