# Memcached

27 Hacker News commenters recommended Memcached and 10 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 6 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Simple, fast, mature in-memory cache that people trust to do one job well. Caveat: slab configuration and memory use can cause operational trouble.

## Why people recommend it

- Simple and works out of the box (4 comments): "It's cheap, reliable, mature, fast, scalable, requires little understanding, has decent quality clients in most languages" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46906356)) "Memcached by contrast is very simple, fast and works without needing to do much fiddling with it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48645321)) "Memcached probably works better out of the box." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48639398))
- Does one job well (4 comments): "all operations are O(1) by design, which is a conscious design choice from the authors" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48641091)) "memcached has always been the pinnacle of "choose boring technology"" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48643833)) "it's highly optimized to do its one job super well" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48643699))
- Fast and scales per node (3 comments): "It's cheap, reliable, mature, fast, scalable, requires little understanding, has decent quality clients in most languages" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46906356)) "Redis, memcached etc all can do 100k or more gets per second" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48645449)) "memcached is multithreaded, so it scales up better per node." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46906923))
- Operationally straightforward pure cache (3 comments): "memcached’s architecture in general more leans towards these directions, which makes it much, much more straightforward from an operations point of view" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48639384)) "optional stateless pure cache with absolutely zero rope to hang yourself on" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48640247)) "I'd use memcached or some equivalent for strictly cacheing" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48642605))

## What people warn about

- Client libraries and sharding burden (4 comments): "With memcached I remember having to mess around the LD_LIBRARY path" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48640015)) "each client did it's own hashing/sharding system" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48646839)) "memcached libary was unmaintained" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47279924))
- Slab configuration and starvation problems (3 comments): "Memcache is great until you get into the business of having to configure slabs." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48643008)) "The memcache slab pools are a leaky abstraction that you may end up having to manage operationally" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48639504)) "Google "memcache slab starvation" if you want the long story" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48645244))
- Crashes and failures under load (3 comments): "it would have low cpu utilization then unexpectedly hit lock contention and fall over without warning" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48639385)) "Literally every one of these has caused hilarious and disastrous failures for me in my career." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49290222)) "fixing memory-leak-caused kube memcached crashes is steeper" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48549206))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Redis](https://hackerapproved.com/p/redis.md): 174 recommend
- [Valkey](https://hackerapproved.com/p/valkey.md): 31 recommend
- [Lux Redis-compatible server](https://hackerapproved.com/p/lux.md): 8 recommend
- [KiviDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/kividb.md): 7 recommend
- [DragonflyDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/dragonfly.md): 5 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Memcached", https://hackerapproved.com/p/memcached/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).