Getting started!
================
A comprehensive, fast, pure-Python memcached client library.

Basic Usage
------------

.. code-block:: python

    from pymemcache.client.base import Client

    client = Client(('localhost', 11211))
    client.set('some_key', 'some_value')
    result = client.get('some_key')

Using a memcached cluster
-------------------------
This will use a consistent hashing algorithm to choose which server to
set/get the values from. It will also automatically rebalance depending
on if a server goes down.

.. code-block:: python

    from pymemcache.client.hash import HashClient

    client = HashClient([
        ('127.0.0.1', 11211),
        ('127.0.0.1', 11212)
    ])
    client.set('some_key', 'some value')
    result = client.get('some_key')


Serialization
--------------

.. code-block:: python

     import json
     from pymemcache.client.base import Client

     def json_serializer(key, value):
         if type(value) == str:
             return value, 1
         return json.dumps(value), 2

    def json_deserializer(key, value, flags):
        if flags == 1:
            return value
        if flags == 2:
            return json.loads(value)
        raise Exception("Unknown serialization format")

    client = Client(('localhost', 11211), serializer=json_serializer,
                    deserializer=json_deserializer)
    client.set('key', {'a':'b', 'c':'d'})
    result = client.get('key')


Key Constraints
---------------
This client implements the ASCII protocol of memcached. This means keys should not
contain any of the following illegal characters:
> Keys cannot have spaces, new lines, carriage returns, or null characters.
We suggest that if you have unicode characters, or long keys, you use an effective
hashing mechanism before calling this client. At Pinterest, we have found that
murmur3 hash is a great candidate for this. Alternatively you can
set `allow_unicode_keys` to support unicode keys, but beware of
what unicode encoding you use to make sure multiple clients can find the
same key.


Best Practices
---------------

 - Always set the `connect_timeout` and `timeout` arguments in the
   :py:class:`pymemcache.client.base.Client` constructor to avoid blocking
   your process when memcached is slow. You might also want to enable the
   `no_delay` option, which sets the TCP_NODELAY flag on the connection's
   socket.
 - Use the "noreply" flag for a significant performance boost. The "noreply"
   flag is enabled by default for "set", "add", "replace", "append", "prepend",
   and "delete". It is disabled by default for "cas", "incr" and "decr". It
   obviously doesn't apply to any get calls.
 - Use get_many and gets_many whenever possible, as they result in less
   round trip times for fetching multiple keys.
 - Use the "ignore_exc" flag to treat memcache/network errors as cache misses
   on calls to the get* methods. This prevents failures in memcache, or network
   errors, from killing your web requests. Do not use this flag if you need to
   know about errors from memcache, and make sure you have some other way to
   detect memcache server failures.