Memcache is a high-performance open-source caching server daemon and it's robust, fast & distributed system. Memcached has a client-server model, the memcached daemon listens of default port 11211, which obviously can be configured to our requirements. In this article we will be looking at a Ruby gem which will be used to implement the benefits of memcache in our Ruby programs, the memcache gem uses libmemcached C library which makes it faster than pure-Ruby memcache gems. I had earlier written an article Faster Webapps With Memcache, which is a good read for beginners. Installing The Gem To install the gem just issue the following command in shell: Code: $ gem install memcached Accessing Memcached Memcached Ruby gem is pretty easy to use, the following code snippets will be self-explanatory. Code: require 'rubygems' require 'memcached' ## connect to Memcached instance running on localhost on the default port 11211 mcache_obj = Memcached.new("localhost:11211") ## set a key/value pair mcache_obj.set 'myName', 'Anjali' ## get the value mcache_obj.get 'myName' # returns "Anjali" ## getting multiple keys' values at once mcache_obj.get ['myName', 'BadKey', 'myName1'] ## returns {"myName" => "Anjali", "BadKey" => "Anjali" } ## delete key mcache_obj.delete 'myName' ## set a key/value with expiry, set to expire after 60 secs mcache_obj.set 'myName', 'Anjali', 60 ## you can also increment values, like counters etc. mcache_obj.set 'Mycounter', 1.to_s, 0 mcache_obj.increment 'Mycounter' # value becomes 2 mcache_obj.increment 'Mycounter' # value becomes 3 I hope this was helpful in getting you started with using memcached in your Ruby programs.