PHP Client Comparison

There are primarily two clients used with PHP. One is the older, more widespread pecl/memcache and the other is the newer, less used, more feature rich pecl/memcached.

Both support the basics such as multiple servers, setting vaules, getting values, increment, decrement and getting stats.

Here are some more advanced features and information.

	pecl/memcache	pecl/memcached
First Release Date	2004-06-08	2009-01-29 (beta)
Actively Developed?	Yes	Yes
External Dependency	None	libmemcached
Features
Automatic Key Fixup1	Yes	No
Append/Prepend	No	Yes
Automatic Serialzation2	Yes	Yes
Binary Protocol	No	Optional
CAS	No	Yes
Compression	Yes	Yes
Communication Timeout	Connect Only	Various Options
Consistent Hashing	Yes	Yes
Delayed Get	No	Yes
Multi-Get	Yes	Yes
Session Support	Yes	Yes
Set/Get to a specific server	No	Yes
Stores Numerics	Converted to Strings	Yes

1. pecl/memcache will convert an invalid key into a valid key for you. pecl/memcached will return false when trying to set/get a key that is not valid.
2. You do not have to serialize your objects or arrays before sending them to the set commands. Both clients will do this for you.

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