Based on their official website memcached is defined as:

Free & open source, high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load.

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.

Memcached is simple yet powerful. Its simple design promotes quick deployment, ease of development, and solves many problems facing large data caches. Its API is available for most popular languages.

— memcached.org

MemCached Server

This is how I installed(a simple installation) my memcached server that can be accessed by a webserver on our local area network. The server is running Ubuntu as its operating system. Caution: The version on ubuntu’s repository could not be the latest version. Refer to memcached’s website for the latest version. If you want to install the latest version from the source you can refer to memcached’s wiki page

Open synaptic package manager and install memcached and php5-memcached. After the installation restart the webserver using the command:

Start memcached by using the command:

By default memcached is running on port 11211 and is accessible by the machine with IP 127.0.0.1 which is the machine’s local IP address with 64MB memory allocation

To try if memcached is working use this simple PHP code

< ?php
$m = new Memcached();
$m->addServer('localhost', 11211);

$m->set('int', 99);
$m->set('string', 'a simple string');
$m->set('array', array(11, 12));
$m->set('object', new stdclass, time() + 300);

var_dump($m->get('int'));
var_dump($m->get('string'));
var_dump($m->get('array'));
var_dump($m->get('object'));
?>

Open the script on the browser. Try opening the cli and telnet to memcached using the command:

The image below shows how the cli would look like after the command

Check memcached’s status by using the command

We can get a cached value using the command:

It should return “a simple string” as assigned on the script.

To explore more, commands can be seen on this page http://lzone.de/articles/memcached.htm

To allow another machine (local web server) to store data on the memcached server we need to edit the configuration file using the command:

In my case I changed the allotted memory to 256MB and allowed IP of 191.168.1.254 which is our windows webserver as seen on the image below:

After the configuration I restarted memcached using the command:

The Webserver (XAMPP)

To quickly test the memcached server I used xampp portable version which can be downloaded on their official website www.apachefriends.org.

As stated earlier the webserver is already allowed to use the memcached server. As an information memcached is a daemon which runs like the mysql server, so we need PHP to connect to the memcached server.

1. To start, download memcached on code.jellycan.com/memcached which is win32 binary.
2. After downloading extract the file (recommended: C:\memcached). You should have the file memcached.exe
3. We can install memcached as a service on the command line using the command:
   C:\memcached\memcached.exe -d install
4. Start memcached using the command:
   C:\memcached\memcached.exe -d start
5. After running memcached we need to tie it with PHP using the php_memcached.dll. You should have this file on your PHP’s ext folder, if not download the file at these links http://downloads.php.net/pierre/, http://www.pureformsolutions.com/pureform.wordpress.com/2008/06/17/php_memcache.dll or on our server: php_memcached.dll.rar
6. enable the use of php_memcached.dll by editing your php.ini and uncomment the line extension=php_memcache.dll if it does not exist add this line. After editing the file restart the webserver.

You can access the data on the memcached server by using the code below:

< ?php
        $memcache = new Memcache();
        if(!$memcache->connect('191.168.1.7', 11211))
                die("Couldn't connect to memcached!");

        $key="string";

        $result = $memcache->get($key);

        if($result)
        {
                echo "$key is $result";
        }
        else
        {
            echo 'There is no data saved named '. $key;
        }
?>

You should have an output of “a simple string”. I hope this helped you set up the server. Happy coding!

Sources:

http://pureform.wordpress.com/2008/01/10/installing-memcache-on-windows-for-php/

http://memcached.org

http://blogs.oracle.com/oswald/entry/cache_cache_cache_part_1

One of the server I am using is running ubuntu. I am installing memcached on the server and every time I restart the web server I always have the error “Could not reliably determine the server’s fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1 for ServerName”. If you are having the same error then this post is for you. To solve the problem this is how I solved the problem.

Open the cli and use the command to edit apache’s config file:

The file is empty by default. Add the line:

Save the changes and restart the server:

I hope this solved the problem… Happy coding!

By Default phpmyadmin can import data on your mysql database up to 2MB of data and beyond that will be an error.  This has been a big problem  by most webmasters and sometimes this can be a barrier to stop improving the sites.  Before I kept on searching what to use to import a large data on my MySQL database and all I can see is BigDump.  It is a software used for large and very large MySQL Dumps which is also an option to import large data on your database.

If you find BigDump a pain in the head then another way to solve the problem is to edit your php.ini file.  All you need to do is open your php.ini file and edit the line

Setting 2M to a larger size will fix the problem.  One problem with this is that it will affect the web server’s runtime limit and could throw an error if you dump a very large data.

Most web developers use a “third party” web server which comes in a package such as WAMP or XAMPP resulting to miss configuration of the web server to perform several capabilities.  One of which is allowing htaccess configuration to take over the webserver’s main configuration.  Even apache itself usage of htaccess is disabled by default and configuring the server is needed to allow htaccess on your server.  Below is how to allow htaccess on your web server:

Open your Apache httpd.conf Configuration File and “uncomment” the line

You can “uncomment” it by removing the number sign “#” resulting to

After removing the number sign you need to change the AllowOverride directive, the default configuration is:

It should be changed to :

You also need to change the line

to

this can be found where you set your DocumentRoot where in my case is set to (</Directory “D:/HTDOCS”>).  After configuring Apache you need to restart the server for the changes to take effect.