How do you know if memcached is doing anything?

Question

I'm testing out using memcached to cache django views. How can I tell if memcached is actually caching anything from the Linux command line?

Answer 1

I know this question is old, but here is another useful approach for testing memcached with django:

As @Jacob mentioned, you can start memcached in very verbose mode (not as a daemon):

memcached -vv 

To test your django cache config, you can use the low-level cache api.

1. First, start up the python interpreter and load your django project settings:

   python manage.py shell 

2. From the shell, you can use the low-level cache api to test your memcache server:

   from django.core.cache import cache cache.set('test', 'test value') 

If your cache configuration is correct, you should see output in memcache similar to this:

<32 set :1:test 0 300 10 >32 STORED 

Answer 2

You could use the official perl script:

memcached-tool 127.0.0.1:11211 stats  

Or just use telnet and the stats command e.g.:

# telnet localhost [memcacheport] Trying 127.0.0.1... Connected to localhost. Escape character is '^]'. stats STAT pid 2239 STAT uptime 10228704 STAT time 1236714928 STAT version 1.2.3 STAT pointer_size 32 STAT rusage_user 2781.185813 STAT rusage_system 2187.764726 STAT curr_items 598669 STAT total_items 31363235 STAT bytes 37540884 STAT curr_connections 131 STAT total_connections 8666 STAT connection_structures 267 STAT cmd_get 27 STAT cmd_set 30694598 STAT get_hits 16 STAT get_misses 11 STAT evictions 0 STAT bytes_read 2346004016 STAT bytes_written 388732988 STAT limit_maxbytes 268435456 STAT threads 4 END