How to Build a Reliable Python Script for Memcached Testing and Error Handling

The author needed a Python script to test a Memcached server and share detailed error information.

First Attempt

Installed python-memcached via yum install python-memcached, verified a successful connection, and used get_stats() to obtain basic status, but the library did not provide clear error messages for timeouts or host/port issues.

Second Attempt

Switched to the umemcached Python client, installed it (and python-devel if needed), and observed that it returned richer error messages that could be filtered.

To capture these messages, the author introduced Python exception handling with try / except blocks, but initially the script printed failures directly to the console instead of redirecting them to a log file.

Third Attempt

After further research on Python exception handling, the author learned to write exception details to a file, which finally resolved the logging issue.

The final script incorporated the improved error handling, wrote messages to a log, and added additional processing of the returned information.

The complete, refined version of the script is shown below.