You could get rid of some of your limitations and make things easier on yourself by using the same technology we use to run memcached at heroku: http://github.

You could get rid of some of your limitations and make things easier on yourself by using the same technology we use to run memcached at heroku: http://github.com/northscale/bucket_engine http://github.com/northscale/bucket_engine In its current form, it's binary only (because we do vertical multi-tenancy there and have no control over multiple applications being on the same instance). It'd be pretty easy to make an IP address based ACL mode for the thing and then you could run binary or ascii just as easily. Advantages: * Key containment (e.g. you can do flush_all) * You don't have to hack up your own memcached server * Binary protocol is a bit easier on the server with things like large multi-gets because they don't cause so much request swell We've also got some basic management stuff for creating and manipulating instances (independently of auth, since we let SASL deal with that). Disadvantages: * You'd have to hack in your IP addr -> bucket mapping * If you want TTL limits, you'd need to hack that in, too Of course, I imagine both are quite easy and would be welcome contributions to the project. :) Let me know if you're interested and need any help.