Just to clarify (as documentation of memcached, even for C lib, frankly is quite lacking), $server_key is hashed using same method as regular keys for values (I checked C source, as again docs......). So you should be able to see where set($key, $value) goes by using getServerByKey($key) with same key. This can be useful if one does not wish to bother with using/has no need to use *ByKey functions, but still want to know which servers are/should be used with regular keys, for implementing fallback or failure reporting.