MMCache, also known as Turck MMCache, is a PHP accelerator

PHP accelerator

A PHP accelerator is a PHP extension designed to improve the performance of software applications written in the PHP programming language.- Operation :...

, or an extension to PHP

PHP

PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...

 meant to improve performance. It is structured as a simple proxy server

Proxy server

In computer networks, a proxy server is a server that acts as an intermediary for requests from clients seeking resources from other servers. A client connects to the proxy server, requesting some service, such as a file, connection, web page, or other resource available from a different server...

 between the web server

Web server

Web server can refer to either the hardware or the software that helps to deliver content that can be accessed through the Internet....

 and the web browser

Web browser

A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...

. Its most important feature is using memcached

Memcached

In computing, memcached is a general-purpose distributed memory caching system that was originally developed by Danga Interactive for LiveJournal, but is now used by many other sites. It is often used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and objects in RAM to reduce the...

 for caching the data in memory. The key identifying the given site is designated from the URL, so if, for example, there is a session defined within the URL, then the proxy will not work effectively.

A newer version of MMCache, MMCache-LB, has an option to connect more web servers behind the proxy, with load balancing

Load balancing (computing)

Load balancing is a computer networking methodology to distribute workload across multiple computers or a computer cluster, network links, central processing units, disk drives, or other resources, to achieve optimal resource utilization, maximize throughput, minimize response time, and avoid...

 between them.

Development work on MMCache was discontinued in 2009, and the code was forked into the eAccelerator

EAccelerator

eAccelerator is a PHP accelerator derived from the MMCache extension for the PHP programming language. eAccelerator provides a bytecode cache. eAccelerator is open source and thereby free to use and distribute. Old and unmaintained versions also provided an encoder.Every time a PHP script is...

application.

External links

• Official website
• Turck MMCache SourceForge page
• PHPCoder, a web based front-end for both MMCache and eAccelerator
• The PHP Scalability Myth, a 2003 article