memcached is a high-performance general-purpose distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended to speed up dynamic Web applications by alleviating database load. The memcached server and clients work together to implement one global cache across as many machines as you have.
This application is based on libevent to scale to any size needed, and is specifically optimized to avoid swapping and always use non-blocking I/O.
This software is used by many major websites to alleviate database load and therefore yield faster page load times, with improved resource utilization. Notable examples include Facebook, Twitter, LiveJournal, YouTube, Reddit, Zynga, Digg, Craigslist, Flickr, and Heroku. Any high traffic site that is dynamically generated with a high database load will benefit from running memcached.
Key Features
- Distributed cache – spread the cache over multiple systems.
- Ability to massively scale out.
- Uses a client–server architecture.
- Two-stage hash approach.
- Provides a giant hash table.
- Threaded operation mode which allows memcached to utilize more than a single CPU and share the cache between all of them.
- Implemented as a non-blocking event-based server.
- Can use SASL authentication support.
- Runs as a standalone service.
Website: memcached.org
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: BSD License
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
memcached is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Caching Systems | |
|---|---|
| Redis | Persistent key-value database with network interface |
| Memcached | High-performance distributed memory object caching system |
| Hazelcast | Distributed in-memory data store and computation platform |
| Apache Ignite | Distributed database, caching and processing platform |
| Ehcache | Standards based pure Java in-process cache |
| Java Caching System | Distributed caching system written in Java |
| Couchbase | Distributed key-value database management system |
| yrmcds | LRU cache library and key-value server |
| Cachelot | Memory object caching system with master/slave replication |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
| Web Caches | |
|---|---|
| Varnish Cache | Web accelerator written with performance and flexibility in mind |
| nginx | Very powerful and efficient web server and reverse proxy |
| Traffic Server | High-performance building block for cloud services |
| Memcached | Distributed memory object caching system |
| Squid | High-performance proxy caching server and web cache daemon |
| nuster | High-performance HTTP proxy cache server |
| Apache | Hugely popular web server with caching modules |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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