Dalli [![Build Status](https://secure.travis-ci.org/mperham/dalli.png)](http://travis-ci.org/mperham/dalli) [![Dependency Status](https://gemnasium.com/mperham/dalli.png)](https://gemnasium.com/mperham/dalli)
=====

Dalli is a high performance pure Ruby client for accessing memcached servers.  It works with memcached 1.4+ only as it uses the newer binary protocol.  It should be considered a replacement for the memcache-client gem.

The name is a variant of Salvador Dali for his famous painting [The Persistence of Memory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Persistence_of_Memory).

![Persistence of Memory](http://www.virtualdali.com/assets/paintings/31PersistenceOfMemory.jpg)

Dalli's initial development was sponsored by [CouchBase](http://www.couchbase.com/).  Many thanks to them!


Design
------------

I decided to write Dalli after maintaining memcache-client for two years for a few specific reasons:

 0. The code is mostly old and gross.  The bulk of the code is a single 1000 line .rb file.
 1. It has a lot of options that are infrequently used which complicate the codebase.
 2. The implementation has no single point to attach monitoring hooks.
 3. Uses the old text protocol, which hurts raw performance.

So a few notes.  Dalli:

 0. uses the exact same algorithm to choose a server so existing memcached clusters with TBs of data will work identically to memcache-client.
 1. is approximately 20% faster than memcache-client (which itself was heavily optimized) in Ruby 1.9.2.
 2. contains explicit "chokepoint" methods which handle all requests; these can be hooked into by monitoring tools (NewRelic, Rack::Bug, etc) to track memcached usage.
 3. supports SASL for use in managed environments, e.g. Heroku.
 4. provides proper failover with recovery and adjustable timeouts


Supported Ruby versions and implementations
------------------------------------------------

Dalli should work identically on:

 * JRuby 1.6+
 * Ruby 1.9.2+
 * Ruby 1.8.7+
 * Rubinius 2.0

If you have problems, please enter an issue.


Installation and Usage
------------------------

Remember, Dalli **requires** memcached 1.4+. You can check the version with `memcached -h`. Please note that memcached that Mac OS X Snow Leopard ships with is 1.2.8 and won't work. Install 1.4.x using Homebrew with

    brew install memcached


You can verify your installation using this piece of code:

    gem install dalli

    require 'dalli'
    dc = Dalli::Client.new('localhost:11211')
    dc.set('abc', 123)
    value = dc.get('abc')

The test suite requires memcached 1.4.3+ with SASL enabled (brew install memcached --enable-sasl ; mv /usr/bin/memcached /usr/bin/memcached.old).  Currently only supports the PLAIN mechanism.

Dalli has no runtime dependencies and never will.  You can optionally install the 'kgio' gem to
give Dalli a 20-30% performance boost.


Usage with Rails 3.x
---------------------------

In your Gemfile:

    gem 'dalli'

In `config/environments/production.rb`:

    config.cache_store = :dalli_store

Here's a more comprehensive example that sets a reasonable default for maximum cache entry lifetime (one day), enables compression for large values and namespaces all entries for this rails app.  Remove the namespace if you have multiple apps which share cached values.

    config.cache_store = :dalli_store, 'cache-1.example.com', 'cache-2.example.com',
        { :namespace => NAME_OF_RAILS_APP, :expires_in => 1.day, :compress => true }

To use Dalli for Rails session storage, in `config/initializers/session_store.rb`:

    require 'action_dispatch/middleware/session/dalli_store'
    Rails.application.config.session_store :dalli_store, :memcache_server => ['host1', 'host2'], :namespace => 'sessions', :key => '_foundation_session', :expire_after => 30.minutes

Dalli does not support Rails 2.x any longer.


Usage with Passenger
------------------------

Put this at the bottom of `config/environment.rb`:

    if defined?(PhusionPassenger)
      PhusionPassenger.on_event(:starting_worker_process) do |forked|
        # Reset Rails's object cache
        # Only works with DalliStore
        Rails.cache.reset if forked

        # Reset Rails's session store
        # If you know a cleaner way to find the session store instance, please let me know
        ObjectSpace.each_object(ActionDispatch::Session::DalliStore) { |obj| obj.reset }
      end
    end

Usage with Unicorn
-----------------------

Modify the `after_fork` block in your unicorn config file:

    after\_fork do |server, worker|
      Rails.cache.reset if Rails.cache.respond_to?(:reset)

      # Reset Rails's session store
      # If you know a cleaner way to find the session store instance, please let me know
      ObjectSpace.each_object(ActionDispatch::Session::DalliStore) { |obj| obj.reset }
    end


Configuration
------------------------
Dalli::Client accepts the following options. All times are in seconds.

**expires_in**: Global default for key TTL.  No default.

**failover**: Boolean, if true Dalli will failover to another server if the main server for a key is down.

**compress**: Boolean, if true Dalli will gzip-compress values larger than 1K.

**socket_timeout**: Timeout for all socket operations (connect, read, write). Default is 0.5.

**socket_max_failures**: When a socket operation fails after socket_timeout, the same operation is retried. This is to not immediately mark a server down when there's a very slight network problem. Default is 2.

**socket_failure_delay**: Before retrying a socket operation, the process sleeps for this amount of time. Default is 0.01.  Set to nil for no delay.

**down_retry_delay**: When a server has been marked down due to many failures, the server will be checked again for being alive only after this amount of time. Don't set this value to low, otherwise each request which tries the failed server might hang for the maximum **socket_timeout**. Default is 1 second.

**value_max_bytes**: The maximum size of a value in memcached.  Defaults to 1MB, this can be increased with memcached's -I parameter.  You must also configure Dalli to allow the larger size here.

**username**: The username to use for authenticating this client instance against a SASL-enabled memcached server.  Heroku users should not need to use this normally.

**password**: The password to use for authenticating this client instance against a SASL-enabled memcached server.  Heroku users should not need to use this normally.

**keepalive**: Boolean, if true Dalli will enable keep-alives on the socket so inactivity

Features and Changes
------------------------

By default, Dalli is thread-safe.  Disable thread-safety at your own peril.

Note that Dalli does not require ActiveSupport or Rails.  You can safely use it in your own Ruby projects.


Helping Out
-------------

If you have a fix you wish to provide, please fork the code, fix in your local project and then send a pull request on github.  Please ensure that you include a test which verifies your fix and update History.md with a one sentence description of your fix so you get credit as a contributor.


Thanks
------------

Eric Wong - for help using his [kgio](http://unicorn.bogomips.org/kgio/index.html) library.

Brian Mitchell - for his remix-stash project which was helpful when implementing and testing the binary protocol support.

[CouchBase](http://couchbase.com) - for their project sponsorship


Author
----------

Mike Perham, mperham@gmail.com, [mikeperham.com](http://mikeperham.com), [@mperham](http://twitter.com/mperham)  If you like and use this project, please give me a recommendation at [WWR](http://workingwithrails.com/person/10797-mike-perham) or send a few bucks my way via my Pledgie page below.  Happy caching!

<a href='http://www.pledgie.com/campaigns/16623'><img alt='Click here to lend your support to Open Source and make a donation at www.pledgie.com !'     src='http://www.pledgie.com/campaigns/16623.png?skin_name=chrome' border='0' /></a>


Copyright
-----------

Copyright (c) 2012 Mike Perham. See LICENSE for details.