From: Ben Bleything <ben@...>
Date: 2008-02-15T07:43:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Memcached: Dealing with unknown keys

On Fri, Feb 15, 2008, Tony Garcia wrote:
> Only the username, email address, and a code are being stored - there 
> are no messages or other items that need to be passed along.

Ah, okay.  It sounds to me like the username, email, and the code *are*
a message, but it's a matter of semantics for sure :D

> Granted - and I am using memcache as a queue in this case. I've done a 
> lot of looking and can't find much else that will do what I need - and 
> Joyent has memcache already installed.

Twitter uses a queue that talks the memcache protocol, but I can't
remember what it's called.  Geoffrey Grosenbach recently posted a cool
blog post about message queues, too.

http://nubyonrails.com/articles/about-this-blog-beanstalk-messaging-queue

> If anyone has a better suggestion, I'd love to hear it. This is the best 
> I've been able to figure out on my own.

I think the main problem is that memcache just isn't intended for what
you're trying to do.  The hash solution you came up with will get the
job done, but it's a bit of a hack (as we both seem to agree).  If it
works though, there's not really any reason to change.

I think if you want to change, you'll need to find some way to pass
messages, but hopefully someone else will have a more creative solution.

Cheers,
Ben