Change Log

New in version 1.7.0

After a hiatus, we are back. A big welcome to @mxamin as a collaborator, hopefully this will prevent further hiata down the line. Also, LLMs have slashed the time investment to near zero, hoo-rah. The biggest change is that we now build against libmemcached 1.1.4 for the wheels. Also the LLM found many memory safety problems, and likely many yet more to come.

New:

  • New exception pylibmc.Timeout (a subclass of pylibmc.Error, with retcode 31) for libmemcached’s MEMCACHED_TIMEOUT.

  • _pylibmc.libmemcached_runtime_version reports the version of the libmemcached library that is actually loaded. Importing pylibmc emits a RuntimeWarning if its major.minor differs from the libmemcached the extension was compiled against.

  • remove_failed=N means a failure limit of N with every supported libmemcached.

  • Error messages now include libmemcached’s description of the error, for example error 3 from memcached_get(somekey): CONNECTION FAILURE. The exception classes and retcode are unchanged, but code that matches the exact text of a message needs updating (#296).

Build and platforms:

  • libmemcached 1.1.x (the awesomized/libmemcached fork, tested with 1.1.4) is supported, in addition to 1.0.x. The test suite runs against both.

  • The wheels are built against libmemcached 1.1.4 and bundle it.

  • Python 3.12, 3.13 and 3.14 are supported. Python 3.7 is no longer supported: pylibmc requires Python 3.8 or newer.

  • Building with LIBMEMCACHED or --with-libmemcached now links the library you named, even when the interpreter’s own link flags mention another libmemcached first. The build prints which library it picked.

  • The source distribution includes the doctests and the test runner.

  • Every wheel is installed and tested by the release pipeline. No wheel is built for CPython 3.8 on macOS arm64, which could not be tested; CPython 3.8 to 3.14 are built everywhere else.

Fixes:

  • Fixed a use-after-free in gets with a str key, which could look up the wrong key (#300).

  • get_multi raises on a connection failure after the request was sent, instead of returning partial results (#301).

  • Zero-length values no longer abort assert-enabled builds, and a subclass that overrides deserialize() receives b"" for them instead of None (#291).

  • deserialize() raises TypeError for non-bytes input with the integer flags instead of reading invalid memory.

  • Fixed reference leaks in incr_multi, delete_multi, set_multi, get_stats, get, gets and at import time (#307 to #312).

  • Fixed a use-after-free in get: when it reported an error for a str key, the key in the message was read from freed memory.

  • With the buffer_requests behavior, set, set_multi, delete, delete_multi, touch and cas no longer raise error 32 when libmemcached only queued the request (#180).

  • set_multi and incr_multi raise MemoryError when an allocation fails; previously they returned without setting an exception.

  • Python 3.13 no longer prints Exception ignored in PyMapping_HasKeyString() when a client is created without behaviors (#297).

Documentation:

  • New “Error codes” section. Expiry times over 30 days are absolute Unix timestamps, and negative times behave differently with the text and the binary protocol; both are now documented, as are tcp_keepalive and _poll_timeout (#115, #273, #56).

Thanks to Christian Clauss, David Szotten, Nikolas Nyby, Miro Hrončok and Bryan C. Mills for their contributions since 1.6.3, and to @mxamin, whose fork supplied several of the ideas behind the build and test changes in this release.

New in version 1.6.0

Though no major feature overhauls have taken place, this release is partially incompatible with 1.5.0. This stems from the fact that python-memcached is now using a flag that pylibmc has been using for some years. python-memcached uses it for a different purpose, and an incompatible one. We deemed that it would be better to support this interoperability. The change also means that Unicode strings are now stored as UTF-8 rather than pickled, which may or may not result in a slight performance improvement for this type of data.

We have also introduced a pickle_protocol behavior to enable seamless interoperability between Python 2.x and 3.x. Also, this release introduces a ManyLinux wheel, making installation a breeze on ManyLinux systems (which I suppose is many linuxes.)

New in version 1.5.0

This release fixes critical memory leaks in common code paths introduced in 1.4.2. Also fixes a critical bug in a corner of the zlib inflation code, where prior memory errors would trigger a double free. Thank you to everybody involved in the making of this release, and especially Eau de Web, without their contributions, this release and the bug fixes it contains wouldn’t have been so expedient.

New in version 1.4.0

Brace yourself, Python 3.x support has come!

Thanks to everybody involved in this project; this release involves less authors but a lot more work per person. Thanks especially to Harvey Falcic for the work he put in, without which there wouldn’t be any Python 3.x support. Also thanks to Sergey Pashinin for the initial stab at the problem.

Other than that, we had miscellaneous bug fixes, testing improvements, and documentation updates.

Last but not least I would like to ask for your support in this project, either by helping out with development, testing, documentation or anything at all; or simply by donating some magic internet money to the project’s Bitcoin address 12dveKhqiJWCY8zXT4kaHdHELXPeGAUo9h

New in version 1.3.0

Because there ain’t nothing better than releasing software in the spring time.

Lots of improvements have come about in just about every corner of the library, thanks to eighteen different authors over almost 20 pull requests. Amazing.

  • Added touch support

  • Added compress_level

  • Added weighted distribution

  • Added automated benchmarking utility

  • Added Travis CI and build status

  • Added behavior dead_timeout

  • Added behaviors tcp_keepalive

  • Added behavior callback_prefix_key

  • Lots of bug tuning, fixes, tests, and documentation

Lastly, thanks in particular to the authors of this release: Abramowitz, Baklanov, Bergström, Borisov, Branson, Brown, Ericson, Hansche, Hlodversson, King, Kowalak, McFague, Moura, Noguchi, Shurter, Williams and Wong.

New in version 1.2.0

This release is for the people behind reddit.com, for helping push development forward. Keep doing your thing.

  • semver.org versioning scheme

  • Fixed GIL issues

  • Added CAS support (ketralnis)

  • Added SASL authentication (Remoun)

  • Added more detail to errors (spladug)

  • Added mapping-like behavior for clients

  • Fixed build errors on Mac OS X

  • Moved to nose for testing

  • Added auto_eject behavior

  • Added num_replicas behavior

  • Added remove_failed behavior

  • Removed cache_lookups behavior

  • Improved repr of clients (noah256)

  • Improved IPv6 support (JshWright)

  • Improved pooling behavior so it doesn’t cause lock-ups

  • Improved tests and testing foundation

  • Improved documentation and structure

  • Internalized Sphinx documentation

  • Bunch of other stuff

New in version 1.1

  • Removed deprecated space-based behavior names.

  • Acquire and release the GIL properly, thanks ketralnis

  • Add support for libmemcached 0.40

  • Included a more useful command-line interface

  • Fixed handling of NUL-byte keys in get_multi in binary protocol

  • Fixed some valgrind-reported memory warnings

  • Fixed bogus usage of time argument for delete.

  • 1.1.1: Fixed tests under Python 2.5

New in version 1.0

  • Lots of documentation fixes and other nice things like that.

  • Nailed what appears to be the last outstanding memory leak.

  • Explicitly require libmemcached 0.32 or newer.

New in version 0.9

  • Added a get_stats method, which behaves exactly like python-memcached’s equivalent.

  • Gives the empty string for empty memcached values like python-memcached does.

  • Added exceptions for most libmemcached return codes.

  • Fixed an issue with Client.behaviors.update.

New in version 0.8

  • Pooling helpers are now available. See pooling.rst in the distribution.

  • The binary protocol is now properly exposed, simply pass binary=True to the constructor and there you go.

  • Call signatures now match libmemcached 0.32, but should work with older versions. Remember to run the tests!

New in version 0.7

  • Restructured some of the code, which should yield better performance (if not for that, it reads better.)

  • Fixed some memory leaks.

  • Integrated changes from amix.dk, which should make pylibmc work under Snow Leopard.

  • Add support for the boolean datatype.

  • Improved test-runner – now tests build/lib.*/_pylibmc.so if available, and reports some version information.

  • Support for x86_64 should now work completely.

  • Builds with Python 2.4, tests run fine, but not officially supported.

  • Fixed critical bugs in behavior manipulation.

New in version 0.6

  • Added compatibility with libmemcached 0.26, WRT error return codes.

  • Added flush_all and disconnect_all methods.

  • Now using the latest pickling protocol.

New in version 0.5

  • Fixed lots of memory leaks, and added support for libmemcached 0.23.

  • Also made the code tighter in terms of compiler pedantics.

New in version 0.4

  • Renamed the C module to _pylibmc, and added lots of libmemcached constants to it, as well as implemented behaviors.