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Learn how to speed up your sites with Memcache.

News/Follow-Ups – 01:05

• Another A/B split tester released – Optimizely

Geek Tools – 03:51

• MIMO UM-710S USB Powered 7 Inch Swivel LCD Screen Mini Display

Webapps – 07:42

• KeyHero Typing Test
• Web Applications Stack Exchange

Memcache – 14:09

• What is it?
  • Short term memory for web applications
  • Distributed
  • Released in 2003 by Brad Fitzpatrick for his website LiveJournal
• Why?
  • Most commonly used to take the load off your database, which is usually the biggest performance bottle neck in web applications
• Who?
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Youtube
  • Wikipedia
  • Reddit
• How?
  • Example
    • When user logs in store user info in memcache
    • Retrieve user information throughout the app from memcache, if the user changes his/her name/pricing plan etc, just delete the cache.
  • What happens when it is full
    • When the table is full, subsequent inserts cause older data to be purged LRU (Least Recently Used)
  • You need to use memcached as a transitory cache, meaning you cannot assume the data will still be in there when you need it.
  • Values can only be 1mb large
  • Each client knows all servers; the servers do not communicate with each other.
• Security
  • By default there is no authentication or security.  Optional support for SASL exists.
• When not to use Memcached
  • When your objects are over 1mb
  • When you have keys larger than 250chars
  • You are running in an insecure environment
  • Before you have profiled your code and done data normalization
• Clients for
  • Perl, C, C#, PHP, Python, Java, Ruby