Question

I’m using GAE memcache to fetch a boolean on each request. This boolean is a flag to enable/disable a particular url.

If its true, everything works as normal, if its false then it sends back a particular format response.

The service is servicing about 7 requests per second, and the problem is Google seems to have introduced limits on accessing memcache and now this fetch is failing consistently at around 1 request per second since a few days ago, so this process has become totally unreliable. I’ve had to do an emergency patch remove this check from the code. But I need an alternative routine to enable/disable the service.

Using a servlet instance variable is an option, but each jvm instance will have their own so it can’t work.

Can anyone suggest a way of doing this?

Answer 1

There are no limits (other than sanity checks) on how often you can access memcache. In any case, though, you should never rely solely on memcache to store a value; you should always have a fallback to a permanent storage mechanism such as datastore.