At first I found a way to dump memcache keys through telnet. However if a memcache instance is fairly large and has a lot of slabs and thousands of keys it becomes impractical to do it manually.

I wrote a simple utility that helps me find keys across all memcache slabs.

#!/usr/bin/php
< ?php
$host = "127.0.0.1";
$port = 11211;
$lookupKey = "";
$limit = 10000;

$time = time();

foreach ($argv as $key => $arg) {
    switch ($arg) {
        case '-h':
            $host = $argv[$key + 1];
            break;
        case '-p':
            $port = $argv[$key + 1];
            break;
        case '-s':
            $lookupKey = $argv[$key + 1];
            break;
        case '-l':
            $limit = $argv[$key + 1];
    }
}

$memcache = memcache_connect($host, $port);

$list = array();
$allSlabs = $memcache->getExtendedStats('slabs');
$items = $memcache->getExtendedStats('items');

foreach ($allSlabs as $server => $slabs) {
    foreach ($slabs as $slabId => $slabMeta) {
        if (!is_numeric($slabId)) {
            continue;
        }

        $cdump = $memcache->getExtendedStats('cachedump', (int)$slabId, $limit);

        foreach ($cdump as $server => $entries) {
            if (!$entries) {
                continue;
            }

            foreach($entries as $eName => $eData) {
                $list[$eName] = array(
                    'key' => $eName,
                    'slabId' => $slabId,
                    'size' => $eData[0],
                    'age' => $eData[1]
                );
            }
        }
    }
}

ksort($list);

if (!empty($lookupKey)) {
     echo "Searching for keys that contain: '{$lookupKey}'\n";
     foreach ($list as $row) {
        if (strpos($row['key'], $lookupKey) !== FALSE) {
            echo "Key: {$row['key']}, size: {$row['size']}b, age: ", ($time - $row['age']), "s, slab id: {$row['slabId']}\n";
        }
     }
} else {
    echo "Printing out all keys\n";
    foreach ($list as $row) {
        echo "Key: {$row['key']}, size: {$row['size']}b, age: ", ($time - $row['age']), "s, slab id: {$row['slabId']}\n";
    }
}

This script accepts 4 parameters:

-h host
-p port
-s partial search string
-l a limit of how many keys to dump from a single slab (default 10,000)

The easiest way to use it:

./membrowser.php -s uk
Searching for keys that contain: ‘uk’
Key: 1_uk_xml, size: 3178b, age: 1728s, slab id: 17
Key: 2_uk_xml, size: 3178b, age: 1725s, slab id: 17
Key: 3_uk_xml, size: 3178b, age: 1721s, slab id: 17

Download memcache keys dump script.

P.S some of the code I’ve copied from 100days.de blog post.

Though myself I feel this is a great poor man’s solution Might end up using it myself.