Its effect is to invalidate all existing items immediately (by default) or after the expiration specified. After invalidation none of the items will be returned in response to a retrieval command (unless it's stored again under the same key after flush_all has invalidated the items).

The most precise definition of what flush_all does is the following: it causes all items whose update time is earlier than the time at which flush_all was set to be executed to be ignored for retrieval purposes.

The intent of flush_all with a delay, was that in a setting where you have a pool of memcached servers, and you need to flush all content, you have the option of not resetting all memcached servers at the same time (which could e.g. cause a spike in database load with all clients suddenly needing to recreate content that would otherwise have been found in the memcached daemon).