Your free cache has been inactive recently - memcache error

Question

I am constantly getting this error for many of my apps suddenly.

Dear MemCachier user,

Regarding your cache with ID my-id: Your cache has been inactive for the last 20 days. It will be deactivated in 10 days.

Note that deactivated caches can always be re-activated on your analytics dashboard. For more information see https://www.memcachier.com/documentation#disabled-caches

Cheers, The MemCachier Team

I have got this email for too many of my apps hosted on heroku till now. One thing common among them is that all those apps are using free version of MemCachier for Rails4 app. Few of these apps are not used frequently but most of them are used very frequently. I haven't got this issue listed anywhere and I want to stop this service from being deactivated.

Any help would be highly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I am the author of the code that sends you these mails. As you can imagine many users create a dev cache to test it but do not deprovision it once they no longer use the cache. Since dev caches are free there is not really an incentive to remove them and we have thousands of unused caches in our system. For this reason we deactivate dev caches after 30 days of inactivity.

The only way you can prevent this from happening is to use your cache at least once every 30 days. If your apps are active less often there are a couple of options:

1. As @FieryCat suggested you could run a cron job that regularly accesses your caches. Obviously we do not encourage this because it leads to unused caches being artificially kept alive.
2. Buy a prod cache as they never get deactivated. Now, I understand that it is unreasonable to buy caches for many apps that only use it once in a while. What you could do however is purchasing one 100MB cache (the smallest paid plan) and share the cache across all your apps. In this case you only need to be careful that each app uses it's own namespace (you can set a namespace in rails with the :namespace option). If you need help setting up a cache that is shared across all your apps, please contact the MemCachier support.

Finally, note that deactivated caches can always be reactivated on the analytics dashboard.