Getting started!

A comprehensive, fast, pure-Python memcached client library.

Basic Usage

from pymemcache.client.base import Client

client = Client(('localhost', 11211))
client.set('some_key', 'some_value')
result = client.get('some_key')

Using a memcached cluster

This will use a consistent hashing algorithm to choose which server to set/get the values from. It will also automatically rebalance depending on if a server goes down.

from pymemcache.client.hash import HashClient

client = HashClient([
    ('127.0.0.1', 11211),
    ('127.0.0.1', 11212)
])
client.set('some_key', 'some value')
result = client.get('some_key')

Serialization

 import json
 from pymemcache.client.base import Client

 def json_serializer(key, value):
     if type(value) == str:
         return value, 1
     return json.dumps(value), 2

def json_deserializer(key, value, flags):
    if flags == 1:
        return value
    if flags == 2:
        return json.loads(value)
    raise Exception("Unknown serialization format")

client = Client(('localhost', 11211), serializer=json_serializer,
                deserializer=json_deserializer)
client.set('key', {'a':'b', 'c':'d'})
result = client.get('key')

Key Constraints

This client implements the ASCII protocol of memcached. This means keys should not contain any of the following illegal characters: > Keys cannot have spaces, new lines, carriage returns, or null characters. We suggest that if you have unicode characters, or long keys, you use an effective hashing mechanism before calling this client. At Pinterest, we have found that murmur3 hash is a great candidate for this. Alternatively you can set allow_unicode_keys to support unicode keys, but beware of what unicode encoding you use to make sure multiple clients can find the same key.

Best Practices

• Always set the connect_timeout and timeout arguments in the constructor to avoid blocking your process when memcached is slow.
• Use the “noreply” flag for a significant performance boost. The “noreply” flag is enabled by default for “set”, “add”, “replace”, “append”, “prepend”, and “delete”. It is disabled by default for “cas”, “incr” and “decr”. It obviously doesn’t apply to any get calls.
• Use get_many and gets_many whenever possible, as they result in less round trip times for fetching multiple keys.
• Use the “ignore_exc” flag to treat memcache/network errors as cache misses on calls to the get* methods. This prevents failures in memcache, or network errors, from killing your web requests. Do not use this flag if you need to know about errors from memcache, and make sure you have some other way to detect memcache server failures.