memcache vs memcached?

Question

I want to use memcached

http://www.danga.com/memcached/

I have installed it through yum install memcached

But now I need to connect to PHP, and there is an extension named memcache and one named memcached? ARGH

http://us3.php.net/manual/en/book.memcache.php
http://us3.php.net/manual/en/book.memcached.php

Could someone point me in the right direction here.. which one is going to work?

Also, do I need to open any ports for it to work even though it's local? After running it, I try telnet 127.0.0.1 11211 and I get connection refused.

If you're looking at this question now, please bear in mind that the accepted answer is *wrong*. Picking a solution based solely on the name is dangerous, particularly when the one with the better name is a worse project. Please look at the other answers for more information. — tylerl, Oct 07 '10 at 23:34
@thanksyo please uncheck the answer you checked. That will just confuse more people coming here late. In the meantime, I downvoted the incorrect answer and suggest others do the same until thanksyo gets around to unchecking it. — joedevon, Sep 06 '13 at 20:07

score 57 · Answer 1 · edited Nov 02 '16 at 21:09

57

You probably want to see the PHP Client Comparison.

Short version: They will both work, and for most cases either one will do just fine.

Regarding the other issue: Yes, you should be able to do telnet 127.0.0.1 11211. Very few firewalls would block localhost from communicating with itself. If you are not able to connect, verify that memcached really is running by doing ps auxwww | grep memcached, which will also show you the command-line arguments used to start memcached. One of the arguments should be -p 11211 or another port number. See man memcached for the meaning of all the possible arguments.

edited Nov 02 '16 at 21:09

Community

1

answered Sep 08 '09 at 16:08

Nate

2,366
4
22
25

3

Upvote for adding some troubleshooting steps. – Jessica McKinnon Sep 08 '09 at 18:37
This is really the clear answer. – johnlemon Aug 12 '13 at 08:41
@Nate, What's the Windows equivalent of `ps auxwww | grep memcached`? – Pacerier Jan 19 '15 at 08:38
1

@Pacerier: Take a look at http://superuser.com/questions/415360/how-do-i-find-out-command-line-arguments-of-a-running-program. Process Explorer is the easiest way to find a running process and see its command-line arguments. – Nate Jan 19 '15 at 20:04
@Pacerier that command checking if the server process is running and seeing how it was invoked. – Jasen Jan 13 '16 at 02:49

score 29 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 08 '09 at 17:56

As Nate's link suggests, both work perfectly well for simple usage. However, memcached supports more features that allow you to get the most performance out of memcached. The binary protocol reduces the amount of data required to be sent between client and server. Multigets and multisets allow you to get/set multiple items at the same time. If you're finding you need more oomph out of memcache, memcached is the better module. The use of libmemcached suggests that the library itself is possibly more optimised than the PHP only version.

Memcached is a more recent module compared to memcache, having only been released 8 months ago. If you need to target an older version of PHP, then you can only really use memcache.

score 26 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 08 '09 at 16:16

26

The short answer: Either one is what you are looking for, but my first choice would be memcache (the first one you listed), purely based on its correct use of nomenclature.

Now here's how I came to that conclusion:

Here is a quick backgrounder in naming conventions (for those unfamiliar), which explains the frustration by the question asker: For many *nix applications, the piece that does the backend work is called a "daemon" (think "service" in Windows-land), while the interface or client application is what you use to control or access the daemon. The daemon is most often named the same as the client, with the letter "d" appended to it. For example "imap" would be a client that connects to the "imapd" daemon.

This naming convention is clearly being adhered to by memcache when you read the introduction to the memcache module (notice the distinction between memcache and memcached in this excerpt):

Memcache module provides handy procedural and object oriented interface to memcached, highly effective caching daemon, which was especially designed to decrease database load in dynamic web applications.

The Memcache module also provides a session handler (memcache).

More information about memcached can be found at » http://www.danga.com/memcached/.

The frustration here is caused by the author of the PHP extension which was badly named memcached, since it shares the same name as the actual daemon called memcached. Notice also that in the introduction to memcached (the php module), it makes mention of libmemcached, which is the shared library (or API) that is used by the module to access the memcached daemon:

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.

This extension uses libmemcached library to provide API for communicating with memcached servers. It also provides a session handler (memcached).

Information about libmemcached can be found at » http://tangent.org/552/libmemcached.html.

In summary, both are functionally the same, but they simply have different authors, and the one is simply named more appropriately than the other.

answered Sep 08 '09 at 16:16

Jessica McKinnon

1,505
8
9

74

Is the name of the project really an appropriate reason to pick one implementation over the other? – David Pashley Sep 08 '09 at 17:41
4

David: Not quite... but it's certainly enough of a reason to leave a particular implementation until last in my testing, thereby effectively giving preference to the other(s). I would most likely still try out all implementations available, but technical flaws in descriptions of software by the author tend to make me wonder about what technical flaws may lie in the software. I did read your comment, though, about the actual software, so I gave you an upvote for your answer too. :-) – Jessica McKinnon Sep 08 '09 at 18:33
4

I never thought the "d" in memcached to mean deamon but to mean the past participle of the verb cache. Plus, you couldn't name the new interface as "memcache" since there was already one with that name. – GetFree May 16 '10 at 23:24
9

The amount of bugs and whether or not the extension is actively developed is *so much more* important than being anal about the problematic d. Seriously, you should not even think about testing one extension last because of something like that, it's completely off the bat – Fake51 Jun 26 '10 at 10:50
13

Erm, both _aren't_ functionally the same: `memcached` supports cas tokens for instance, `memcache` doesn't. If you need those, you know which (ill named or not) to pick. – Wrikken Sep 24 '10 at 11:53
2

Like others I agree nomenclature is not a good way to pick an open source component. I'd urge people to read this review before choosing: http://brian.moonspot.net/php-memcached-issues – Flubba Jan 05 '12 at 02:38
Bio: "With 15 years of experience in Windows Server technologies, including IIS, SQL Server, ..." -- that explains it :-) – umassthrower Apr 06 '12 at 22:33
memcached is far more complete and less buggy. The API for detecting errors in the memcache module is confusing, too, since it conflates a value like 'false' stored in cache with an error condition. memcached keeps errors separate. – aredridel Feb 28 '13 at 18:41
Don't hate brah, @JessicaMcKinnon is here for the lulz – Jul 30 '13 at 03:12
sorry jessica :( I downvoted this too, based on all the other stuff going on on this page – JDS May 15 '14 at 16:16

score 23 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 24 '10 at 04:15

The older, buggier one is called php-memcache because that seemed the most appropriate name. The newer, better version independently developed by the folks at Digg was instead named php-memcached in the interest of disambiguation.

People who would recommend you pick one over the other based solely on the correctness of the name really have no business offering technical advice.

score 7 · Answer 5 · answered Nov 09 '09 at 21:08

Having used php-memcache recently, I'd have to point you to php-memcached.

Here's a couple of reasons off the top of my head..

1) There's no getErrorCode() or equivalent method, so if get() returns FALSE, you'll have no idea whether that's because the value stored in memcache IS false, or whether there was an issue of some sort.

2) Its hashing algorithm for consistent hashing appears to differ from other implementations, such as the many client libraries built off of libmemcached. This means that if you want to use the same memcache cluster with multiple languages, you will likely have issues where you'll store a value with the PHP client, and other clients won't find it.

score 3 · Answer 6 · answered Jun 24 '10 at 17:26

3

Both have issues as of today. PECL/memcache is old and reliable, with a few exceptions where it is out dated. PECL/memcached 1.x is beta at best. Some functions don't deal with numeric keys, it leaks connections when using persistent connections. Some (all?) is being fixed in GitHub and will be released at some point in 2.x, but not today. For a more detailed review see http://brian.moonspot.net/php-memcached-issues

answered Jun 24 '10 at 17:26

Brian Moon

131
1

PECL/memcached 1.x is now stable; PECL/memcache 2.x is limited; PECL/memcache 3.x is highly unstable. – aredridel Feb 28 '13 at 18:43

score 2 · Answer 7 · answered Dec 02 '09 at 15:21

I'm working on a book "Expert PHP and MySQL". I wrote pretty much the same thing about the differences. What I recommended was PECL/memcached. #1 - it wraps around a full-featured well-performing C library #2 - it is more recently maintained. #3 - more features. No disparagement to PECL/memcache.

score 1 · Answer 8 · answered Sep 05 '12 at 19:24

I've had some pretty severe issues with Drupal 6 and php-pecl-memcached in which response times were delayed by up to 5ms per call and would cause one particular site to create 5x more calls than before the change to php-pecl-memcached. Changing to php-pecl-memcache fixed all of the problems; latency and extra calls.

This answer is here solely to help those using Drupal 6 and possibly Drupal 7.

score -3 · Answer 9 · edited Aug 10 '12 at 12:43

memcache is a client of memcached (the server)
libmemcached is also a client to memcached

And there are other clients for memcached, see http://code.google.com/p/memcached/wiki/Clients

Cut & paste from the web:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/intro.memcache.php

  Memcache module provides handy procedural and object oriented 
  interface to memcached, highly effective caching daemon, which was 
  especially designed to decrease database load in dynamic web applications.
The Memcache module also provides a session handler (memcache).
More information about memcached can be found at » www.memcached.org

http://www.php.net/manual/en/intro.memcached.php

   » memcached (http://www_memcached_org/) 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.
  This extension uses libmemcached library to provide API for communicating with
  memcached servers. It also provides a session handler (memcached).
  Information about libmemcached can be found at 
   » tangent.org/552/libmemcached.html

http://pecl.php.net/package/memcached "PHP extension for interfacing with memcached via libmemcached library" This extension uses libmemcached library to provide API for communicating with memcached servers. https://github.com/andreiz/php-memcached

http://pecl.php.net/package/memcache "memcached extension" Memcached is a caching daemon designed especially for dynamic web applications to decrease database load by storing objects in memory. This extension allows you to work with memcached through handy OO and procedural interfaces.

http://code.google.com/p/memcached/wiki/PHPClientComparison

                        pecl/memcache      pecl/memcached
  First Release Date      2004-06-08         2009-01-29 (beta)
  Actively Developed?     Yes                    Yes
  External Dependency     None              libmemcached

This long-winded answer doesn't even come close to making things clear for the poster. The poster is already aware there are multiple clients. Listing them, and proposing alternative names, doesn't make it easier to pick the right one. — Martijn Heemels, Apr 09 '11 at 21:39

memcache vs memcached?

9 Answers9

Linked