Have you heard of Memcached? Well Here’s What It Is.

Websites are faced with the challenge of delivering loads of dynamic content to visitors and with the decreasing attention span of those who are impatient to wait when the content is served too slow.

Normally, servers would load pages every time they are requested, which could have a slow-down effect on the speed at which a frequently accessed page is served to the visitor.

Also, the repeated queries to the database server can lead to a non-cost-effective resource usage. Luckily, there are tools like Memcached that can help you streamline the data reading process and hence reduce the load on the server and the waste of valuable resources.

What is Memcached? 

Memcached works as a caching layer between the requests of the visitors and the server itself.

Technically speaking, Memcached caches data and objects in the server’s RAM so that the frequently requested data can be served directly from the memory instead of the database server/API.

Here is an illustration of how Memcached works during the first and each following request:

First User Request

When a user opens a page for the first time, the request is sent straight to the database server and, in the meantime, the data is stored in the Memcached server.

Second User Request

The next time the user makes a request for the same page, the data will be retrieved directly from the Memcached memory instead of the database server.