Description:

mcache is a PHP extension that aims to enable developers to easily
and efficiently cache data to Memcached servers. Memcached is a
distributed data caching system developed by Danga which aims to
reduce load on central bottlenecks like RDBMS's. The mcache php
extension has been developed by John McCaskey and is a wrapper
around libmemcache. Both Sean Chittenden (author of libmemcache),
and Antony Dovgal (author of the original PECL memcached
extensions) deserve some of the credit for this work. Without the
excellent C API of libmemcache I would have never written this
extension, and likewise without the example of the PECL extension
provided by Antony I would likely have taken much longer to learn
how to write a PHP extension properly.

The primary advantage to using this mcache extension over other
PHP extensions is speed, and functionality. Previously several PHP
memcache API's have existed. Several of these are very good
feature-wise, but very slow due to native PHP implementation. The
PECL extension has excellent speed (although not as good as
mcache), but does not support multiple servers. Users have been
forced to choose between speed and functionality. With the
introduction of this new extension that is no longer the case.
Furthermore, because this extension is based off libmemcache it
will easily benefit from any testing, bug fixes, or enhancements
made to the underlying library.