Testing Memcached connection
Question: I want to run a basic service which shows the status of various other services
on the system (i.e. Mongo, Redis, Memcached, etc).

For Memcached, I thought that I might do something like this:

    
    
    from django.core.cache import cache 
    
    host, name = cache._cache._get_server('test')
    

This seems to return a host and an arbitrary string. Does the host object
confirm that I'm connecting to Memcached successfully?

I know that the returned host object has a `connect()` method. I'm slightly
scared to open a new connection in production environment and I don't have an
easy Dev setup to test that method. I assume that it's in one of the Python
Memcached libraries, but I'm not sure which one is relevant here.

Can I just use the `_get_server` method to test Memecached connection success,
or should I use the connect method?


Answer: There are various things you could monitor, like memcache process up, memcache
logs moving etc. that don't require network connectivity. Next level of test
would be to see that you can open a socket at the memcache port. But the real
test is of course to set and get a value from memcache. For that kind of
testing I would probably just use the python-memcached package directly to
make the connection and set and get values.

