How do you confirm django is using memcached? - django

Question

I have a python django webserver that I am trying to use memcached to make it faster.
I have downloaded and installed memcached and started it a user called virtual as follows:
/usr/local/bin/memcached -u virtual &
on the django setting.py, I have put the memcached server as this:
MEMCACHE_HOSTS = ['192.168.101.1:11211']
I can do telnet 192.168.101.1 11211 and stats, I do see some statistics there etc.
How do I really know if my django server utilizing the memcached? Is there directory that I can look at or some files to confirm?
Thank you for any insight.
content of manage.py:
#!/usr/bin/env python
import os
import sys
from django.core.management import execute_from_command_line
if __name__ == "__main__":
os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "settings")
from django.core.management import execute_from_command_line
execute_from_command_line(sys.argv)
from the command line:
phthon
from django.core.management import execute_from_command_line
and when I do this:
from django.core.cache import cache
I get these errors:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "/usr/local/lib64/python2.6/site-packages/django/core/cache/__init__.py", line 69, in <module>
if DEFAULT_CACHE_ALIAS not in settings.CACHES:
File "/usr/local/lib64/python2.6/site-packages/django/conf/__init__.py", line 54, in __getattr__
self._setup(name)
File "/usr/local/lib64/python2.6/site-packages/django/conf/__init__.py", line 47, in _setup
% (desc, ENVIRONMENT_VARIABLE))
django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: Requested setting CACHES, but settings are not configured. You must either define the environment variable DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE or call settings.configure() before accessing settings.

Answer 1

You can test cache in Django's shell (python manage.py shell):
>>> from django.core.cache import cache
>>> cache.set('foo', 'bar', 600)
>>> cache.get('foo')
'bar'
If cache.get() returns the set value it means that cache is working as it should. Otherwise it will return None.
An other option is to start memcached with $ memcached -vv, since it will log all the cache accesses to the terminal. Or alternatively you can install monitoring tool for memcached (i.e. memcache-top) and check that something is happening in memcached while using your app.