Memcache uses a client–server architecture, maintain a key–value associative array, China, Tabpear

Software architecture of Memcache

The system uses a client–server architecture. The servers maintain a key–value associative array; the clients populate this array and query it by key. Keys are up to 250 bytes long and values can be at most 1 megabyte in size.

Clients use client-side libraries to contact the servers which, by default, expose their service at port 11211. Both TCP and UDP are supported. Each client knows all servers; the servers do not communicate with each other. If a client wishes to set or read the value corresponding to a certain key, the client's library first computes a hash of the key to determine which server to use. This gives a simple form of sharding and scalable shared-nothing architecture across the servers. The server computes a second hash of the key to determine where to store or read the corresponding value. The servers keep the values in RAM; if a server runs out of RAM, it discards the oldest values. Therefore, clients must treat Memcached as a transitory cache; they cannot assume that data stored in Memcached is still there when they need it. Other databases, such as MemcacheDB, Couchbase Server, provide persistent storage while maintaining Memcached protocol compatibility.

If all client libraries use the same hashing algorithm to determine servers, then clients can read each other's cached data.

A typical deployment has several servers and many clients. However, it is possible to use Memcached on a single computer, acting simultaneously as client and server. The size of its hash table is often very large. It is limited to available memory across all the servers in the cluster of servers in a data center. Where high-volume, wide-audience Web publishing requires it, this may stretch to many gigabytes. Memcached can be equally valuable for situations where either the number of requests for content is high, or the cost of generating a particular piece of content is high.

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