Memcached is a general-purpose memory-caching system. This means it is designed to save (or cache) answers to questions that take a long time to compute or retrieve and are likely to be asked again. A common use case is to accelerate the use of a database: for example, if we expect to need the list of “names of all people who are on team X” repeatedly, we might put this data in Memcached rather than run a SQL query each time. (Note: Memcached is occasionally referred to as “memcache.” We will stick to the full name throughout this article.)
