What is Memcached?
Memcached is a free and open source, high-performance, distributed memory object caching system. The primary objective of Memcached is to enhance the response time for data that can otherwise be recovered or constructed from some other source or database. It is used to avoid the need to operate SQL database or another source repetitively to fetch data for a concurrent
request.
Memcached can be used for
Social Networking->Profile Caching
Content Aggregation-> HTML/ Page Caching
Ad targeting-> Cookie/profile tracking
Relationship->Session caching
E-commerce -> Session and HTML caching
Location-based services-> Database query scaling
Gaming and entertainment->Session caching
Memcache helps in
Speed up application processes
It determines what to store and what not to
Reduce the number of retrieval requests to the database
Cuts down the I/O ( Input/Output) access (hard disk)
Drawback of Memcached is
It is not a persistent data store
Not a database
It is not an application specific
It cannot cache large object