eliminating memcached's 30-day limit

Question

Why does memcached impose a 30-day limit on the lifetime of cache entries?

In my system, I am always setting the lifetime to be 30 days, since that's the max allowed value. Setting it to a value much greater than 30 days would be ideal for my app.

Is there a way to change the "30-day" value to something else?

I am considering downloading the memcached source and recompiling it for my own use. I would either change the "30" to "300" or perhaps get rid of that check entirely. If I were to do this, would I be changing something that would cause memcached to malfunction or perform poorly? My expectation would be that items would be allowed to remain in the cache for longer, and they items would be removed from the cache when the cache gets full.

Answer 1

30 days is the limit at which we consider the time you specified to be a TTL from now.

If you want longer than 30 days, it's fine, just use an absolute time (time() + whatever).

If you want no time-based expiration, as ConroyP says, just use 0.