Skip to main content

libmemcached wrapper

Project description

pylibmc is a Python wrapper around the accompanying C Python extension _pylibmc, which is a wrapper around libmemcached from TangentOrg.

You have to install libmemcached separately, and have your compiler and linker find the include files and libraries.

With libmemcached installed and this package set up, the following basic usage example should work:

>>> import pylibmc
>>> mc = pylibmc.Client(["127.0.0.1:11211"])
>>> mc.set("foo", "Hello world!")
True
>>> mc.get("foo")
'Hello world!'

The API is pretty much python-memcached. Some parts of libmemcached aren’t exposed yet. I think.

There’s also support for some other features not present in other Python libraries, for example, the binary protocol:

>>> mc = pylibmc.Client(["127.0.0.1"], binary=True)

That’s it, the binary protocol will be used for that instance.

Behaviors

libmemcached has ways of telling it how to behave. You’ll have to refer to its documentation on what the different behaviors do.

To change behaviors, quite simply:

>>> mc.behaviors["hash"] = "fnv1a_32"

For a list of the defined behavior key names, see what the keys of a client is. For example:

>>> mc.behaviors.keys()  # doctest: +NORMALIZE_WHITESPACE
['hash', 'connect timeout', 'cache lookups', 'buffer requests',
 'verify key', 'support cas', 'poll timeout', 'no block', 'tcp nodelay',
 'distribution', 'sort hosts']

The hash and distribution keys are mapped by the Python module to constant integer values used by libmemcached. See pylibmc.hashers and pylibmc.distributions.

Pooling

In multithreaded environments, accessing the same memcached client object is both unsafe and counter-productive in terms of performance. libmemcached’s take on this is to introduce pooling on C level, which is correspondingly mapped to pooling on Python level in pylibmc:

>>> mc = pylibmc.Client(["127.0.0.1"])
>>> pool = pylibmc.ThreadMappedPool(mc)
>>> # (in a thread...)
>>> with pool.reserve() as mc:
...     mc.set("hello", "world")

For more information on pooling, see my two long posts about it.

Comparison to other libraries

Why use pylibmc? Because it’s fast.

See this (a bit old) speed comparison, or amix.dk’s comparison.

IRC

#sendapatch on chat.freenode.net.

Change Log

New in version 0.9

  • Added a get_stats method, which behaves exactly like python-memcached’s equivalent.

  • Gives the empty string for empty memcached values like python-memcached does.

  • Added exceptions for most libmemcached return codes.

New in version 0.8

  • Pooling helpers are now available. See pooling.rst in the distribution.

  • The binary protocol is now properly exposed, simply pass binary=True to the constructor and there you go.

  • Call signatures now match libmemcached 0.32, but should work with older versions. Remember to run the tests!

New in version 0.7

  • Restructured some of the code, which should yield better performance (if not for that, it reads better.)

  • Fixed some memory leaks.

  • Integrated changes from amix.dk, which should make pylibmc work under Snow Leopard.

  • Add support for the boolean datatype.

  • Improved test-runner – now tests build/lib.*/_pylibmc.so if available, and reports some version information.

  • Support for x86_64 should now work completely.

  • Builds with Python 2.4, tests run fine, but not officially supported.

  • Fixed critical bugs in behavior manipulation.

New in version 0.6

  • Added compatibility with libmemcached 0.26, WRT error return codes.

  • Added flush_all and disconnect_all methods.

  • Now using the latest pickling protocol.

New in version 0.5

  • Fixed lots of memory leaks, and added support for libmemcached 0.23.

  • Also made the code tighter in terms of compiler pedantics.

New in version 0.4

  • Renamed the C module to _pylibmc, and added lots of libmemcached constants to it, as well as implemented behaviors.

Project details


Download files

Download the file for your platform. If you're not sure which to choose, learn more about installing packages.

Source Distribution

pylibmc-0.9.tar.gz (20.5 kB view hashes)

Uploaded source

Supported by

AWS AWS Cloud computing and Security Sponsor Datadog Datadog Monitoring Fastly Fastly CDN Google Google Download Analytics Microsoft Microsoft PSF Sponsor Pingdom Pingdom Monitoring Sentry Sentry Error logging StatusPage StatusPage Status page