Memcached

When your database can't keep up with the demands of your application, one option open to you instead of buying better or more hardware to power your database is to add a caching layer to your application or website.

This is used, for example, to keep a copy of a repeating part of your website, like a header, for re-use, rather than having to rebuild it using information from the database every time a page is viewed. This saves your database's time for where its really needed and allows the same hardware to serve more simultaneous users.

Memcached is a popular piece of software that is used to aid caching - the repeating part of the website is stored in memory using memcached and can then be retrieved instantly when it is required again. Whilst memcached is not the only way to achieve this, you can for example just save the information to disk, memcached is generally the best option and is probably the most widely used. It offers very fast storage and retrieval because it is in memory. It also offers effective mechanisms to invalidate cache and libraries exist to allow it to be used from a range of programming languages.

Memcached also comes with features to allow a cache pool to be shared across a number of servers, which avoids every server in the pool having to duplicate the work - offering obvious, and significant, performance benefits.

Memcached enables some of the worlds largest sites to keep going including Facebook, Slashdot, Youtube and Twitter

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