I wanted to put something specific in the title, like “Speed up your service” or “Reduce server load” or “Limit database calls” or… You see why I chose “Better Living.”
Memcached is a memory caching system with an obvious name. It allows you to store basically any data that can be serialized into a giant, memory-resident hash, then retrieve it with its unique key.
Imagine not querying your database on every request, and you only begin to get a sense of how useful this is.
Let’s go through a simple, single-server setup. Read the rest of this entry »