LornaJane

Updating Memcached on Ubuntu Jaunty

Wednesday, June 17. 2009

I've been working with memcache-related things lately and ran into a problem where the library I was using just didn't seem to do what its documentation said it would. It turned out that it was making a "gets" call rather than a "get" call - and this functionality wasn't introduced to memcached until version 1.2.4. Closer inspection shows that although Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope (9.04) is only a few months old, and memcached 1.2.4 is about 18 months old, its not included and Ubuntu versions Hardy, Intrepid and Jaunty all had 1.2.2 version of memcached.

Credit to the Ubuntu people for resolving this issue already - since memcached 1.2.8 is currently pencilled in for Karmic Koala release of Ubuntu later this year - but I can't wait that long so I updated my own memcached, it was pretty easy so here are the steps in case anyone else wants to do the same.
  1. download memcached from http://www.danga.com/memcached/download.bml

  2. check you have the dependencies you need. The only thing I didn't have was the libraries for libevent, which you can install through aptitude with aptitude install libevent-dev

  3. compile as you usually would: configure/make/make install


The final step is to get memcached running - I actually did aptitude remove memcached to get rid of my old version and stop myself from being confused later. Then to start it from command line I used:

/usr/local/bin/memcached -m 64 -p 11211 -u nobody -l 0.0.0.0

The above worked for me and allowed me to use the functionality available in the newer library (specifically I was looking to use the cas (compare and swap) functionality in the new PHP memcached extension) - it probably works on other distros too but I didn't test it, if it works for you or if you have anything to add then please leave a comment!
Posted by LornaJane in tech at 09:04 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)
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I’ve also heard complaints that the Jaunty bundled memcached is compiled as single-threaded.

I’ve complained about Ubuntu’s memcached packages before in their bug system, but didn’t get much traction. One of the many reasons I don’t use Ubuntu anymore.

Fedora 11 memcached is version 1.2.8, yay! :)

#1 LinuxJedi (Homepage) on 2009-06-19 09:54 (Reply)

Did you have a chance to go to Andre’s all the little pieces talk at DPC? I learned a lot about memcache’s slabs, storage bits, multipliers and such there, so I think I’m in a way better position to configure it properly.

#2 Paul Reinheimer (Homepage) on 2009-06-19 11:04 (Reply)

LinuxJedi: I am not using it in production so haven’t run into those issues (yet), thanks for the update though.

Paul: I didn’t see that talk, sounsd like I missed out. Since I don’t run production platforms for a living these days, I don’t have much need to work with memcache in anger, but I’d be very interested to know how you get on with it.

#3 LornaJane (Homepage) on 2009-06-19 12:13 (Reply)

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Thu, 02.09.2010 14:14
Hi Lorna Jane, Thanks for all this – the info on PHP and Soap on the Net is a total mess. Some choosing to to use nusoap.php – which now doesnt even exist anymore. Great work using this method I was up and running very quickly. However – this method only shows a call passing one paramet [...]
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Wed, 01.09.2010 13:03
Thanks so much to everyone that has dropped in and said that this tip is working for them – I had to refer back to this myself the other day to remind me how to get around the FTP prompt!
sherra about Wordpress Automatic Update Asking for FTP
Fri, 27.08.2010 04:17
great insight. thank you. I moved my blog and forgot what I needed to do to avoid ftp. your suggestion works like a charm.
Carl Nobile about Logrotate Error on Ubuntu
Fri, 27.08.2010 00:16
This issue seems to happen when you move a DB from one machine to another as I did. The procedure you describe above should be put into MySQL documentation. You should put in a bug report to the MySQL people as their documentation needs to updated. And yes the PASSWORD parameter needs to be re [...]
Rudger Gravestein about One-Step Symlink Switch
Mon, 23.08.2010 09:19
i also move the current, so in case of non working result, i can easily move it back. mv -fT current fallback; mv -fT next current;
Anon about One-Step Symlink Switch
Sun, 22.08.2010 19:43
This is a convenient way to upgrade, and is certainly a good thing for development / testing environments. On a busy site there might be a slim risk this technique could be problematic. Although the file system is updated in an atomic transaction, a web browser could still read from both the [...]
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Sun, 22.08.2010 17:35
Once more you shine girl yer its true you’re a PHP babe :D
Edmar about One-Step Symlink Switch
Sat, 21.08.2010 20:17
Nice to see a post about this. :-) 100% of our deploys are done using symlinks. We copy our releases into revision-specific folders (which are rev123, rev124, etc.). Deploy is done using: cd /software-revisions-folder ln -sf rev124 current To revert: ln -sf rev123 current Thi [...]
Deep C about One-Step Symlink Switch
Fri, 20.08.2010 19:09
This is very interesting and helpful tip. I just felt its quite similar to adding a new node to link list in C and moving pointer to next :)