yukes.com >> Lazy Jay

You know what memcached is, right?

memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load.

Danga Interactive developed memcached to enhance the speed of LiveJournal.com, a site which was already doing 20 million+ dynamic page views per day for 1 million users with a bunch of webservers and a bunch of database servers. memcached dropped the database load to almost nothing, yielding faster page load times for users, better resource utilization, and faster access to the databases on a memcache miss.

PHP has long had memcached support… but its weak… and still has fairly basic issues (I have an open bug – consistent hashing algorithm broken)  Also, it isn’t compatible with the MySQL UDF memcached functions, or command line tools!

One of MySQL’s top dogs — Brian Aker — built libmemcached… a C/C++ library that found its way into Ruby, Python and Perl. All except PHP!

Until now! A new Digg employee — Andrei Zmievski — has wrapped libmemcached into a new extension! You can download it here: PECL memcached Finally!

UPDATED: 2009/02/18

For you tech wiz kids out there… Read this dope article by Paul Saab / Facebook Engineering …. how they leverage memcached and super optimized the hell out of it!

UPDATED: 2009/09/30

I just noticed that this PECL memcached is now ’stable’ as of 2009/07/07 — def check it out now:
http://pecl.php.net/package/memcached