Alex Hopmann’s Blog

I mentioned last week that I was going to have a hard time playing with Mesh because it won’t run with UAC disabled. First of all, Microsoft did post an explanation of why the current version requires UAC. I understand the explanation, but it is one of the typical cases where teams have to build on this internal technology and that one and this other one, none of which are ready for prime-time and all of which aren’t necessarily focused on actually providing user value…

In any case, I did install it on two XP machines. I’m about to shut it off. I noticed one of them was running a bit slow lately and checked the task manager. Mesh is using 490MB of memory, and has consumed 9 hours of CPU over the past couple of days. And in case it wasn’t clear, I haven’t really been asking it to DO anything…

I’m also mildly annoyed that the process is named “Moe.exe” so it took a small amount of digging to figure out what it was that was consuming all my system resources. They also have a second process called MoeMonitor.exe that somehow has consumed over 1.25hours CPU and 33mb RAM. It appears to be responsible for the task-bar icon.

The Memcache protocol specification defines a command “Append” that looks very useful. You can use it to add data to an existing key without having to do a read/write (and deal with race-conditions that can introduce).

The only catch is that the standard PHP Memcache client implementation I’m using doesn’t seem to support it. So I think I’m out of luck until someone adds it to the standard PHP memcache client library I use.

Of course this is all open source so I’m probably just supposed to grab the PHP sources and add it myself, right? Wow does that sound like a lot of effort…

Update- I discovered that version 3.0 of the Memcache PHP client library supports append. They are on 3.0.1 now but the status is still officially “beta” so I guess I’ll just wait a bit more, but its good to see this is coming soon. Also note that you need the memcached server version 1.2.4 for append.