Ok, I think I wasn't clear enough in my question, so I wrote a simple example.
<?php set_time_limit(0); $m = new Memcached('pool'); $m->addServer('172.16.0.64', 11211); $m->add('monkeys', '5'); while(1){ $m->get('monkeys'); sleep(5); } ?> If 5 of these are running at the same time, I would *like* to have them all sharing the same connection. But that's not what happens: [r...@lifebook ~]# php testMemcachePool.php & [1] 3291 [r...@lifebook ~]# netstat -tnap | grep 11211 tcp 0 0 172.16.1.84:47401 172.16.0.64:11211 ESTABLISHED 3291/php [r...@lifebook ~]# php testMemcachePool.php & [2] 3294 [r...@lifebook ~]# netstat -tnap | grep 11211 tcp 0 0 172.16.1.84:47401 172.16.0.64:11211 ESTABLISHED 3291/php tcp 0 0 172.16.1.84:47402 172.16.0.64:11211 ESTABLISHED 3294/php [r...@lifebook ~]# php testMemcachePool.php & [3] 3297 [r...@lifebook ~]# netstat -tnap | grep 11211 tcp 0 0 172.16.1.84:47401 172.16.0.64:11211 ESTABLISHED 3291/php tcp 0 0 172.16.1.84:47402 172.16.0.64:11211 ESTABLISHED 3294/php tcp 0 0 172.16.1.84:47403 172.16.0.64:11211 ESTABLISHED 3297/php [r...@lifebook ~]# php testMemcachePool.php & [4] 3300 [r...@lifebook ~]# netstat -tnap | grep 11211 tcp 0 0 172.16.1.84:47404 172.16.0.64:11211 ESTABLISHED 3300/php tcp 0 0 172.16.1.84:47401 172.16.0.64:11211 ESTABLISHED 3291/php tcp 0 0 172.16.1.84:47402 172.16.0.64:11211 ESTABLISHED 3294/php tcp 0 0 172.16.1.84:47403 172.16.0.64:11211 ESTABLISHED 3297/php [r...@lifebook ~]# php testMemcachePool.php & [5] 3303 [r...@lifebook ~]# netstat -tnap | grep 11211 tcp 0 0 172.16.1.84:47404 172.16.0.64:11211 ESTABLISHED 3300/php tcp 0 0 172.16.1.84:47405 172.16.0.64:11211 ESTABLISHED 3303/php tcp 0 0 172.16.1.84:47401 172.16.0.64:11211 ESTABLISHED 3291/php tcp 0 0 172.16.1.84:47402 172.16.0.64:11211 ESTABLISHED 3294/php tcp 0 0 172.16.1.84:47403 172.16.0.64:11211 ESTABLISHED 3297/php On our production servers, we might have 200 apache processes running at the same time (each running PHP). We have 21 memcached buckets, so our worst case scenario is 4200 active connections to memcached from just one front end node. In reality I'm counting 2583 with a sate of ESTABLISHED right now with 137 httpd processes. -- To unsubscribe, reply using "remove me" as the subject.