Searching memcached java in google, the first result is Using Memcached with Java.
The guy (who calls himself Just some Random Asshole in the Internet!) proposes a Singleton based on net.spy.memcached. It basically creates 20 threads and connections by creating 20 instances of MemcachedClient. For every request it chooses one at random.
However those threads and connections are never closed and they pile up every time I hot swap the application during development (with warnings from Tomcat 7).
SEVERE: The web application [/MyAppName] appears to have started a thread named
[...] but has failed to stop it. This is very likely to create a memory leak.
By looking at MemcachedClient JavaDoc, I see a method called shutdown with the only description being “Shut down immediately.” Shut down what? The client? The server? I suppose is the client, since it’s in MemcachedClient and I suppose that this method would close the connection and terminate the thread. EDIT: yes, it shuts down the client.
Question 1 How to force the execution of cleanup code in Tomcat 7, before the application is hot swapped?
Question 2 Is this approach of using memcached (with cleanup code), correct or is better I start over in a different way?
It turned out that it was a bug of Java AWS SDK and was not related to memcached. Version 1.2.2 of Java AWS SDK has this bug fixed.