Hi everyone,

I am trying to work out a good way to handle offline/down memcached servers in my current web application that are built with PHP.

I just found this link that shows an approach on how to do what I want, I think: http://cmunezero.com/2008/08/11/consistent-memcache-hashing-and-failover-with-php/

Anyhow, it gets me confused when I start working with it and reading the PHP documention about failover with memcache. Why is offline memcache servers added to the $realInstance server pool together with the online servers?

Reading the memcache documentation confuses me even more: http://www.php.net/manual/en/memcache.addserver.php

status

Controls if the server should be flagged as online. Setting this parameter to FALSE and retry_interval to -1 allows a failed server to be kept in the pool so as not to affect the key distribution algorithm. Requests for this server will then failover or fail immediately depending on the memcache.allow_failover setting. Default to TRUE, meaning the server should be considered online.

Thanks,