Memcached

Designing a website is one thing, but maintaining a completed website and ensuring it runs smoothly is a different animal. Code can be added to help grease the proverbial gears and speed up loading times, but adding too much code could easily create the opposite effect. It takes a team of developers to help the best sites run like well-oiled machines, or it could just take Memcached. This brilliant, open source software is years in the making and is used by some of the largest sites on the internet. It's primarily used for memory object caching, which can speed up dynamic web apps by lightening the overall database load. An easy way of looking at it is adding some enhanced, short-term memory for applications. Memcached accomplishes these feats by taking memory from parts of the system where there is too abundant and reallocating it to areas in need. In technical terms, the software logically combines smaller bits of cached memory into a larger pool that can be drawn upon by independent web servers that might have different needs, rather than forcing a set amount of memory to each web server, which might not need all of it. For example, if one had 50 web servers that each had a 64 megabyte spare cache to use, Memcached would instead create a 3.2 gigabyte usable cache that all web servers could use as they need it.