Using the latest memcache-client in Rails

One annoyance with ActiveSupport is waiting for the vendored libraries to get upgraded. Recently, we wanted the latest and greatest version (1.7.4) of the memcache-client as we were experiencing some interesting timeout issues.

Mike Perham, the memcache-client maintainer, documented how to do this (“Using memcache-client 1.6.x in Rails < 2.3”).  His hack works great if the memcache-client gem is installed, but not if you vendor the gem.  I like to have my gems under source control, so here is a how I hacked ActiveSupport to use memcache-client 1.7.4.

Working great so far :–)