Memcached

Technology

How to flush the contents of a Memcached instance

October 1, 2008 by 4 Comments

Here is a convenient way to flush the entire contents of your Memcached instance using telnet.

$ telnet localhost 11211
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
flush_all
OK
quit
Connection to localhost closed by foreign host.
$

Once you are connected to the appropriate memcached host and port (using telnet), use the flush_all command (which should return an OK response) followed the quit command to flush the current cache contents.

Technology

Solaris CoolStack 1.3 released

June 11, 2008 by 2 Comments

CoolStack is a collection of some of the most commonly used open source applications optimized for the Sun Solaris platform. The latest version of this software suite, Cool Stack 1.3, has just been released. Here is a brief overview:

Notable Additions

  • Python 2.5.2
  • Nginx 0.6.31
  • New Apache modules including mod_python, mod_ruby, mod_dtrace etc.

Updated Versions

  • Apache 2.28
  • Tomcat 5.5.26
  • MySQL 5.1.24
  • PHP 5.2.6
  • Memcached 1.2.5
  • Ruby 1.8.6p114 with Ruby Gems 1.1.1 and Rails 2.0.2

Other Enhancements

  • Ruby performance improvements in the order of 20-30% (with a further 8-15% coming down the line when Ruby 1.8.7 is released)
  • Better support for installing Ruby Gems that require native compilation on SPARC systems

The addition of Nginx an Python support along with the performance improvements in Ruby as well as the additional Apache modules are all very useful additions and have yet again come at just the right time for our organisation. Well done to Shanti and his team for providing almost exactly everything we were hoping for in this release, again!

Technology

Solaris CoolStack 1.2 released

November 3, 2007 by 0 Comments

CoolStack is a collection of some of the most commonly used open source applications optimized for the Sun Solaris OS platform. I’ve been tracking the release of the next version, CoolStack 1.2, for some time and see that it has just been released. Here is a brief overview of what it gives you:

  • Apache 2.2.6 with mod_jk-1.2.25, mod_proxy and SMF support.
  • PHP 5.2.4 with FastCGI support.
  • APC 3.0.14.
  • MySQL 5.0.45 with ndbcluster and SMF support.
  • Memcached 1.2.2.
  • Squid 2.6.16 with SMF support.
  • Tomcat 5.5.23 with SMF support.
  • Ruby 1.8.6 with RubyGems and Rails 1.2.3.
  • lighttpd 1.4.18.
  • Perl 5.8.8 with DBI-1.59, DBD-mysql-4.005 and Sys-Syslog-0.18 extensions

As you can see, CoolStack is now a pretty serious software bundle and there isn’t much it doesn’t give you (although DTrace support for Ruby would be a useful addition). The addition of Tomcat and SMF support (SMF allows easier management of Solaris services) along with the additional Apache modules and updated revisions of Apache, MySQL, Ruby and Rails tick a large number of boxes in our organisation as we previously had to build several Apache modules by hand, struggled with lack of Perl DBI/DBD extensions and spent far too long constructing SMF manifests for many of the applications.

So, well done to Shanti and his team for providing almost exactly everything we were hoping for in this release! CoolStack has now become an integral part of our software infrastructure, reducing our service deployment times considerably.