Installing Memcache on cPanel server or VPS to Improve Page Speeds

Memcache is one of several different caching methods available for Apache/PHP web servers. It is designed to speed up websites and web apps, especially those utilizing databases, by caching frequently-accessed data and objects in RAM for quicker access.

Installing Memcache on a cPanel server or cPanel VPS is a simple, and effective way to begin optimizing your existing website. Follow the steps below to install and activate Memcache and its service daemon, memcached. 

How to Install Memcache on a cPanel Server or VPS

Log in to your cPanel VPS or cPanel server via SSH as the root user.

Install memcache via yum:

yum install memcached

Start the memcached service on the server:

service memcached start

Next, install memcache for PHP from source, running each command separately:

wget http://pecl.php.net/get/memcache

tar zxvf memcache-3.0.8.tgz

cd memcache-3.0.8

phpize

The result of “phpize” should look like this:

# phpize
Configuring for:
PHP Api Version:         20100412
Zend Module Api No:      20100525
Zend Extension Api No:   220100525

Compile memcache:

./configure

make

make install

Open your server’s php.ini file, and search for “extension=memcache.so”. If it is not present, add the following line to the bottom of the php.ini file:

extension=memcache.so

Restart Apache:

service httpd restart

Make sure memcached will be up even after a server reboot:

# chkconfig --levels 235 memcached on

To confirm whether Memcache is installed and active with the server’s current PHP configuration, run the command like below:

root@server [~]# php -m | grep memcache
memcache

You should see “memcache” returned from the list of active PHP modules. Memcache (memcached) is now installed and running on the server!