Today\'s high-traffic websites must implement performance-boosting measures that reduce data processing and reduce load on the database, while increasing the speed of content delivery. One such method is the use of a cache to temporarily store whole pages, database recordsets, large objects, and sessions. While many caching mechanisms exist, memcached provides one of the fastest and easiest-to-use caching servers. This talk will cover memcached and the memcache extension for PHP from setting up a memcached server to using it to provide a variety of caching solutions, including the use of memcached as a session data store.

1. Give Your Site A Boost With Memcache
Ben Ramsey
July 23, 2008

2. Why cache?
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3. To make it faster.
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4. “A cache is a collection of data duplicating original
values stored elsewhere or computed earlier,
where the original data is expensive to fetch
(owing to longer access time) or to compute,
compared to the cost of reading the cache. In
other words, a cache is a temporary storage area
where frequently accessed data can be stored for
rapid access.” 4
— Wikipedia

5. Why cache?
You want to reduce the number of retrieval
queries made to the database
You want to reduce the number of external
requests (retrieving data from other web
services)
You want to cut down on filesystem access
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