Md5 as memcached_key

Server NGINX
1

Hello,

Does anyone know if nginx can calculate the md5 of a $request_uri
string? I’d like to set the $memcached_key as the md5 of the
request_uri when passing requests for cached content to my memcached
instance.

In concept the directive might look like this;

location /testing {
set $memcached_key $md5($request_uri);
memcached_pass localhost:11211;
}

Thanks!

2

md5 is not guaranteed to be unique, that is to say, two seperate
inputs can generate the same hash, so you would need to use extra
logic in your application if you wanted to guard against this remote
possibility. I’m guessing the problem you are trying to solve is the
memcache key has a limitation that is shorter than the possible
request_uri ?

Cheers

Dave

3

Em 26/01/2009, às 20:47, Geoff Geoff escreveu:

Dave

Thanks Dave,

The problem is that memcached will not allow certain characters in the
key name - so I thought it might be simpler to just store the md5 of
the
actual request_uri.

Thanks,
Geoff

There are the theoretical chance of colision, yes, but you probably
can use
it anyway without a practical chance of colision.

Sergio Devojno Bruder
[email protected]
Haxent Consultoria
http://haxent.com.br/
41 3362-1460
41 9933-8764

4

Dave C. wrote:

md5 is not guaranteed to be unique, that is to say, two seperate
inputs can generate the same hash, so you would need to use extra
logic in your application if you wanted to guard against this remote
possibility. I’m guessing the problem you are trying to solve is the
memcache key has a limitation that is shorter than the possible
request_uri ?

Cheers

Dave

Thanks Dave,

The problem is that memcached will not allow certain characters in the
key name - so I thought it might be simpler to just store the md5 of the
actual request_uri.

Thanks,

Geoff

5

I agree that since this is not a cryptographic application, the fact
that
md5 has some collisions is less relevent, maybe even irrelevent unless
you
have a very large set of URIs you need to pull from memcached uniquely.

Due to the way nginx configuration and modules work, I am not sure that
it
is viable to have $md5(SOMETHING) return md5. A more likely (and
probably
relatively easy to implement) solution might be something like this:

location /testing {
set_md5 $memcached_key $request_uri;
memcached_pass localhost:11211;
}

Perhaps I’ll take a shot at it later on in the week :).

6

Hello,

Less efficient for sure but you could use perl_set $memcached and a
simple perl script returning the md5 for a request_uri.

xav

Le 26 janv. 09 à 18:43, Geoff Geoff a écrit :