I wanted a simple command-line tool to be able to grab real-time stats from memcache (memcached, I know, I know), and output it in a view something like top. I couldn't find anything like it, so I wrote one myself in perl. When writing it, I tried to keep it simple, portable, and lightweight. (No memcached perl modules required! I tried to keep it to modules I thought would be preinstalled on almost any modern system. It's also fairly polite - non-critical modules get checked, and if they aren't installed, the functionality is disabled without spewing errors or dying.) I realize it's not written well. But, hey, at least it exists, right? Until the day I released it, there wasn't any comparable tool like it for memcached. It gives you the basic stats, and not too much else. (You can specify thresholds, for instance, and it'll change color to red if you exceed the thresholds. You can also choose the refresh/ sleep time, and whether to show immediate (per second) stats, or lifetime stats. But it pretty much all revolves around those stats.)