Vital Logs

So I was trying to use the memcache increment method during my implementation of the view counter. Whenever I issue a CACHE.incr, CACHE.get starts to fail on that key. I found out what the problem is.

When get is called without specifying the raw argument, it defaults to false, which means that the memcache-client lib will marshal the value passed before sending it to memcache. Then when we issue an incr to the memcached server, it tries to increment the marshaled version which is a binary sequence representing a ruby object (Fixnum in this case) and messes it up.

The solution is to pass the raw parameter to MemCache.set as true, which will prevent the marshaling (later we should call set with a true raw as well) which will give memcached an integer (although treated as string on the ruby side) that it can increment safely.

I created a raw_get, raw_put and raw_incr that can be used together. They are nicely contained in a Cache module (yes, I’m using the same name as the memcache_util.rb module) under our lib folder.