[ANN] ActiveRecord + memcache = cached_model

Courtesy of The Robot Co-op.

$ yes | sudo gem install cached_model

Or, you can download cached_model and memcache-client (our zippy-fast
memcache library, required) from:

http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=1266

I don’t have the README posted for making cached_model work online
yet, so here it is:

= CachedModel

Rubyforge Project:

http://rubyforge.org/projects/rctools/

== About

CachedModel stores Rails ActiveRecord objects in memcache allowing
for very
fast retrievals. CachedModel uses the ActiveRecord::Locking to
ensure that
you don’t perform multiple updates.

== Using CachedModel

First, install the cached_model gem:

$ sudo gem install cached_model

Then set up memcache-client:

$ tail -n 20 config/environments/production.rb
memcache_options = {
:c_threshold => 10_000,
:compression => true,
:debug => false,
:namespace => ‘my_rails_app’,
:readonly => false,
:urlencode => false
}

CACHE = MemCache.new memcache_options
CACHE.servers = ‘localhost:11211’

session_options = {
:database_manager => CGI::Session::MemCacheStore,
:cache => CACHE,
:session_domain => ‘trackmap.robotcoop.com
}

ActionController::CgiRequest::DEFAULT_SESSION_OPTIONS.update
session_options

You will need separate namespaces for production and development, if
using
memcache on the same machine.

Note that using memcache with tests will cause test failures, so set
your
memcache to be readonly for the test environment.

Then make Rails load the gem:

$ tail -n 4 config/environment.rb

Include your application configuration below

require_gem ‘cached_model’

Then edit your ActiveRecord model to inherit from CachedModel instead of
ActiveRecord::Base:

$ head -n 8 app/models/photo.rb

A Photo from Flickr.

class Photo < CachedModel

 belongs_to :point
 belongs_to :route


Eric H. - [email protected] - http://segment7.net
This implementation is HODEL-HASH-9600 compliant

http://trackmap.robotcoop.com

Eric,

That sounds great! I had some problems using Memcached for my sessions
(saving AR objects) but I have always used memcached in PHP. One thing I
was
wondering is how do you handle stale/deleted data. Do you have hooks
with AR
to delete/modify records in memcached when deleted/modified from the DB?

Thanks,

Adrian M.

On Jan 17, 2006, at 3:35 PM, Adrian M. wrote:

That sounds great! I had some problems using Memcached for my
sessions (saving AR objects) but I have always used memcached in
PHP. One thing I was wondering is how do you handle stale/deleted
data. Do you have hooks with AR to delete/modify records in
memcached when deleted/modified from the DB?

Of course. cached_model hooks into update, destroy and reload to
DTRT. You’ll need to use ActiveRecord::Locking to make it work.


Eric H. - [email protected] - http://segment7.net
This implementation is HODEL-HASH-9600 compliant

http://trackmap.robotcoop.com

On Jan 17, 2006, at 3:07 PM, Eric H. wrote:

Courtesy of The Robot Co-op.

$ yes | sudo gem install cached_model

Or, you can download cached_model and memcache-client (our zippy-
fast memcache library, required) from:

Eric-

A big thanks for sharing this. A very nice addition to rails

development.

Cheers-
-Ezra Z.
Yakima Herald-Republic
WebMaster
http://yakimaherald.com
509-577-7732
[email protected]

This is cool…but it breaks my usage of memcache as a Fragment Cache
store
as your implementation of the MemCache#initialize method doesn’t allow
the
servers to be passed in with the options.

Why do you have a substantially different memcache client?

Your code looks like an older version of the Ruby memcache with some
bugs
fixed. What’s slow about it? What did you change to make it faster?
Why
not get updates into the Ruby memcache project?

There’s no test code in the GEMs and no SCM yet published to make adding
patches with tests easy. Can we get these so we can provide you with
these
updates?

On Jan 17, 2006, at 4:53 PM, Tom F. wrote:

This is cool…but it breaks my usage of memcache as a Fragment
Cache store
as your implementation of the MemCache#initialize method doesn’t
allow the
servers to be passed in with the options.

I welcome patches and adore patches with tests.

Why do you have a substantially different memcache client?

Because Ruby-memcache is too slow.


Eric H. - [email protected] - http://segment7.net
This implementation is HODEL-HASH-9600 compliant

http://trackmap.robotcoop.com

On Jan 17, 2006, at 5:26 PM, Tom F. wrote:

Your code looks like an older version of the Ruby memcache with
some bugs
fixed.

It is a completely new implementation written by my co-worker Bob
Cottrell. It looks similar because Bob copied the core
functionality. Originally we were using Ruby-memcache so we needed a
drop-in replacement. It doesn’t support everything that Ruby-
memcache does due to YAGNI.

What’s slow about it? What did you change to make it faster? Why
not get updates into the Ruby memcache project?

Ruby-memcache does fancy stuff with io/reactor that made it go
slower. Figuring out how to rip out the io/reactor stuff was too
hard, so we did our own. (We’ve had this client since 2004-11-18
19:07:46 -0800.)

There’s no test code in the GEMs

Unfortunately, Bob isn’t one with Test::Unit like I am. There will
be tests when I get a new stock of round tuits.

and no SCM yet published to make adding patches with tests easy.

Right now it is stored in on our internal SVN server. Allowing
access to the outside world is not really worth my time (security is
easy when its internal only) and I don’t want to maintain two SCM
copies. (Maybe that svk think I keep hearing about will help.)

Can we get these so we can provide you with these updates?

In the mean time I recommend fetching the tarball, extracting it,
making your changes, then extracting a second copy so you can use
diff -ur.

Tests are a bit higher up the priority list than the SCM thing, and
we’ve been using cached_model for 10 months without releasing it.
Round tuits have been in very short supply around here.

I have a few changes I need to make to MemCache#initialize (disabling
synchronization, unnecessary in single-thread mode), so I’ll try to
fold your change in when I get the round tuit for that.


Eric H. - [email protected] - http://segment7.net
This implementation is HODEL-HASH-9600 compliant

http://trackmap.robotcoop.com

In lieu of a patch to the memcache code, here’s an update that will
allow
fragment caching to work with both implementations of memcache.

Environment.rb (or production.rb)

Rails::Initializer.run do |config|

config.action_controller.fragment_cache_store = :mem_cache_store,
memcache_options

end

Allow us to set the CACHE as the Fragment Cache store

module ActionController
module Caching
module Fragments
class MemCacheStore
def data=(cache)
@data = cache
end
end
end
end
end

ActionController::Base.fragment_cache_store.data = CACHE