Distributed Data Caching Using Memcached

Building a high demand site that serves billions of hits a month like livejournal or friendster is not as easy as writing a php code, grab data from the db and then spit out a page. DB access always have a huge performance penalty for a given site. Some site approach this problem by building more slave db’s to distribute reads. This is very costly and sometimes you’re still restricted to how fast your db can retrieve data. Another approach which we will discuss today is caching in RAM using memcached.

Memcached (with the “d”) is a distributed in-memory caching developed by Danga Interactive and some volunteers. A php client library is available and  can be downloaded via pecl. To know more about memcached you can visit their site at http://danga.com/memcached/. In my next article, I’ll give you an overview on how to implement caching on your code. But for now, just read through http://www.php.net/memcache.

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