The release candidate for spymemcached 2.6 has been posted, with several enhancements including performance improvements, transcoder support, and enhanced timeout handling. The big change in this release is the improved handling of timeouts, which addresses issues reported by users, particularly those running applications on busy systems or networks, where a RuntimeException from the `get()` method call was occurring due to complex work underneath optimizing how spymemcached is used. To address these issues, the new release candidate now guards against sending operations that have timed out, preventing them from being sent over the network and extending the effect of any momentary disruptions until they are worked through.