Memcached optimizes specific high-load serving applications that are designed to take advantage of its versatile no-locking memory access system. clients are available in several different programming languages, to suit the needs of the specific application. traditionally this has been used in mod_perl apps to avoid storing large chunks of data in apache memory, and to share this burden across several machines.

danga interactive developed memcached to enhance the speed of livejournal.com, a site which was already doing 20 million+ dynamic page views per day for 1 million users with a bunch of webservers and a bunch of database servers. memcached dropped the database load to almost nothing, yielding faster page load times for users, better resource utilization, and faster access to the databases on a memcache miss.

this package contains the shared libraries (c client api) for memcached. if you are looking for a perl client api, please see the libcache-memcached-perl package.