In Django/python, how do I set the memcache to infinite time?

Question

cache.set(key, value, 9999999)

But this is not infinite time...

Answer 1

def _get_memcache_timeout(self, timeout):
    """
    Memcached deals with long (> 30 days) timeouts in a special
    way. Call this function to obtain a safe value for your timeout.
    """
    timeout = timeout or self.default_timeout
    if timeout > 2592000: # 60*60*24*30, 30 days
        # See http://code.google.com/p/memcached/wiki/FAQ
        # "You can set expire times up to 30 days in the future. After that
        # memcached interprets it as a date, and will expire the item after
        # said date. This is a simple (but obscure) mechanic."
        #
        # This means that we have to switch to absolute timestamps.
        timeout += int(time.time())
    return timeout

And from the FAQ:

What are the limits on setting expire time? (why is there a 30 day limit?)

You can set expire times up to 30 days in the future. After that memcached interprets it as a date, and will expire the item after said date. This is a simple (but obscure) mechanic.

Answer 2

Another simple technique is to write the generated HTML out to a file on the disk, and to use that as your cache. It's not hard to implement, and it works quite well as a file-based cache that NEVER expires, is quite transparent, etc.

It's not the django way, but it works well.