Memcached Deep Dive for System Design Interviews
Memcached is the original distributed caching system and remains one of the most efficient solutions for high-throughput caching workloads. Companies like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube rely on Memcached to handle billions of requests per day with sub-millisecond latency.
While Redis has become more popular due to its rich feature set, Memcached still excels in specific scenarios. Knowing when to choose Memcached over Redis, how it distributes data, and understanding its architecture is valuable knowledge for system design interviews.
This chapter covers the practical knowledge you need to discuss Memcached confidently in interviews: architecture, consistent hashing, memory management, scaling strategies, and common patterns.