Golang Memcached Stats Items (Detailed Guide w/ Code Examples)

Use Case(s)

The stats items command in Memcached is used to get statistics about the items stored in the cache. This command gives detailed information about each item such as the number of items currently in the cache, the age of the oldest item, etc. This feature can be useful for debugging or optimizing your application's performance.

In Golang, we can use the gomemcache package, a Memcached client library, to interact with a Memcached server and fetch these stats.

Code Examples

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"github.com/bradfitz/gomemcache/memcache"
)

func main() {
	mc := memcache.New("localhost:11211")

	// Fetch item statistics
	it, err := mc.StatsItems()
	if err != nil {
		fmt.Println(err)
		return
	}

	for k, v := range it {
		fmt.Printf("Key: %s, Value: %s\n", k, v)
	}
}

In this example, we first initialize a new Memcached client by providing the server address (localhost:11211). Then, we call the StatsItems() function to get the item statistics. The function returns a map where each key corresponds to a different statistic and the value is the statistic's value.

Best Practices

Here are some best practices:

1. Avoid pulling stats frequently in production environments as it may impact the performance.
2. Handle errors properly. Always check if an error occurred when calling StatsItems().

Common Mistakes

One common mistake is not checking the error returned from the StatsItems() method. If the Memcached server is not reachable or any other error occurs, it returns an error which should be properly handled.

FAQs

Q: What does the 'age' stat mean in Memcached?

A: The 'age' statistic is the time in seconds since the oldest item (by expiration time) was added to the cache. It can be used to understand how long items are typically staying in your cache before they're replaced.