When should I use Memcache instead of Memcached?

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Memcached client library was just recently released as stable. It is being used by digg ( was developed for digg by Andrei Zmievski, now no longer with digg) and implements much more of the memcached protocol than the older memcache client. The most important features that memcached has are:

  1. Cas tokens. This made my life much easier and is an easy preventive system for stale data. Whenever you pull something from the cache, you can receive with it a cas token (a double number). You can than use that token to save your updated object. If no one else updated the value while your thread was running, the swap will succeed. Otherwise a newer cas token was created and you are forced to reload the data and save it again with the new token.
  2. Read through callbacks are the best thing since sliced bread. It has simplified much of my code.
  3. getDelayed() is a nice feature that can reduce the time your script has to wait for the results to come back from the server.
  4. While the memcached server is supposed to be very stable, it is not the fastest. You can use binary protocol instead of ASCII with the newer client.
  5. Whenever you save complex data into memcached the client used to always do serialization of the value (which is slow), but now with memcached client you have the option of using igbinary. So far I haven’t had the chance to test how much of a performance gain this can be.

All of this points were enough for me to switch to the newest client, and can tell you that it works like a charm. There is that external dependency on the libmemcached library, but have managed to install it nonetheless on Ubuntu and Mac OSX, so no problems there so far.

If you decide to update to the newer library, I suggest you update to the latest server version as well as it has some nice features as well. You will need to install libevent for it to compile, but on Ubuntu it wasn’t much trouble.

I haven’t seen any frameworks pick up the new memcached client thus far (although I don’t keep track of them), but I presume Zend will get on board shortly.

UPDATE

Zend Framework 2 has an adapter for Memcached which can be found here

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