To obtain some stats about a memcached process, use nc to talk directly to it:

# echo "stats" | nc -w 1  11211
STAT pid 1750
STAT uptime 29481383
STAT time 1369781775
STAT version 1.4.5
STAT pointer_size 64
STAT rusage_user 6974.991909
STAT rusage_system 13000.624488
STAT curr_connections 10
STAT total_connections 132871296
STAT connection_structures 1674
STAT cmd_get 227296759
STAT cmd_set 113549712
STAT cmd_flush 0
STAT get_hits 221783239
STAT get_misses 5513520
STAT delete_misses 0
STAT delete_hits 0
STAT incr_misses 36444
STAT incr_hits 19304751
STAT decr_misses 3
STAT decr_hits 19367598
STAT cas_misses 0
STAT cas_hits 0
STAT cas_badval 0
STAT auth_cmds 0
STAT auth_errors 0
STAT bytes_read 26222582271
STAT bytes_written 25905663432
STAT limit_maxbytes 67108864
STAT accepting_conns 1
STAT listen_disabled_num 0
STAT threads 4
STAT conn_yields 0
STAT bytes 27010093
STAT curr_items 366610
STAT total_items 113554333
STAT evictions 0
STAT reclaimed 5291352
END

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