Checking on memcache’s health

From time to time a client on WebFaction will experience a hiccup in their memcache process. It’s not obvious at first unless the site is under heavy load (New Relic is a huge help in diagnosing the problem); this post is just a central dumping ground for links related to fixing the issue.

• Setting up memcache to a sock file
• Figuring out how much memory you have available
• Webfaction script to check memory use by process
• Checking if memcache is running on a port
• Checking whether Django is actually using the cache