Set up Memcached distributed memory object caching system

Memcached is an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) from results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering. It’s used as a backend for persistent cache implementation on some older projects (newer projects mostly use Redis).

1 Install

Execute on the command line:

sudo apt install memcached
sudo apt install libmemcached-tools

You also need to install PHP extension:

sudo apt install php-memcached

2 Start

2.1 Start automatically

Execute on the command line:

sudo systemctl enable memcached

This will start the server and set it up to start automatically after a reboot.

To stop the server and prevent it from running after a reboot, execute:

sudo systemctl disable memcached

2.2 Start manually when needed

Memcached is a service in Ubuntu so it can be started and stoped as regular services:

sudo service memcached start
sudo service memcached stop
sudo service memcached restart
sudo service memcached status

3 Test

To test if the memcached server is running, execute:

ps aux | grep memcached

You should see its process there, altogether with the port on which it listens to (default 11211).

Then you can telnet to it with:

telnet localhost 11211