Memcache Caching System and its advantages

The Memcached caching system was first developed by Brad Fitzpatrick for his website LiveJournal, on May 22, 2003. Memcached is a general-purpose distributed memory caching system that was originally developed by Danga Interactive for LiveJournal but is now used by many other sites.

It is often used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and objects in RAM to reduce the number of times an external data source (such as a database or API) must be read. Memcached runs on Unix, Windows, and MacOS etc.

The system is used by sites including YouTube, Reddit, Zynga, Facebook, and Twitter. Heroku (now part of Salesforce) offers a NorthScale-managed Memcached add-on service as part of their platform as a service.

Google App Engine also offers a Memcached service through an API. Memcached is also supported by some popular CMSs such as Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress.

Most deployments of Memcached exist within trusted networks where clients may freely connect to any server. There are cases, however, where Memcached is deployed in untrusted networks or where administrators would like to exercise control over the clients that are connecting.

For this purpose, Memcached Caching System can be compiled with optional SASL authentication support. The SASL support requires the binary protocol.