To anyone else that might start with Memcache it should be noted that it does not fail gracefully if your servers decide to crap out. We deployed a group of 8 M

To anyone else that might start with Memcache it should be noted that it does not fail gracefully if your servers decide to crap out. We deployed a group of 8 Memcache servers to our production environment and due to a mis-configuration all the webservers were brought to their knees since the get/set would wait for the Memcache server to respond even with the PHP specific settings (timeout etc..) set to appropriate values. For a safe use you should implement a simple home-grown "active memcache server" list so in the event of utter failure only the first couple requests to Memcache will try to request from the server list and as they fail you can knock them out of the pool. It's worth the 10 minutes it takes to implement and will save your ass if things go wrong.