Checking memcached stats and preventing empty responses
A quick google for how to check stats for memcached quickly turns up the following command:
echo stats | nc internal.ip 11211
Netcat is a utility for poking about in just about all network interfaces or protocols, so can be used to pipe information to memcached. Note: you’ll need to have netcat installed in order to have the “nc” command and Debian/Ubuntu have both netcat-traditional and netcat-openbsd. Install the openbsd version.
The problem I had was that checking stats returned a blank response about 90% of the time. The cause of this issue is that netcat sends the string “stats” to memcached, declares victory and then closes the connection before memcached has a chance to reply. Solution? Just tell netcat to wait a bit using the “-i” flag which waits after sending lines of text. Like this:
echo stats | nc -i 1 internal.ip 11211
To check a remote machine, I wound up with:
ssh the_remote_machine "echo stats | nc -i 1 internal.ip 11211"
