Question: Hey, my friend at Y! vertical search is looking for a decent memcached library in PHP but he says apparently too many of them. I haven’t even looked at the problem since I’ve never hit that sort of load with my session store yet.

Any suggestions of one library/code snippet in particular? Something quick and dirty.

Answer (Don MacAskill of SmugMug): I think he’s probably best off to use the PECL memcache extension. In our tests, it was 3X the performance of our heavily-optimized handwritten PHP library, even with persistent connections disabled.

It supports HA features, too, for installations with multiple instances, so the cache doesn’t get mis-aligned.