Well, the python-memcache was 50x faster, got it down to only 4x faster w/ memcache-client as suggested.
Two other things I’ve noticed:
Python is much more stable - I very rarely get any kind of corruption or unexpected behavior - I’ve had to start over 5 times w/ ruby’s memcache.
Ruby seems to care much more about marshaling, etc. Python seems quite happy to let you leave things as strings and do your own parsing.
Am I insane to consider trying to figure out how to use a python library in ruby? Is there such a thing? Or perhaps I should use a ReST API hosted by python, available from ruby - http://localhost:11212/search?key='red’ (and in fact I’m only going to be GETing from ruby - doing all the bulk cache loading on the python side thanks very much).