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The size of this hash table is often very large. Applications using Memcached typically layer requests and additions into RAM before falling back on a slower backing store, such as a database. When the table is full, subsequent inserts cause older data to be purged in least recently used (LRU) order. Memcached's APIs provide a very large hash table distributed across multiple machines. Memcached runs on Unix-like operating systems (at least Linux and OS X) and on Microsoft Windows. Memcached is free and open-source software, licensed under the Revised BSD license. It is often used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and objects in RAM to reduce the number of times an external data source (such as a database or API) must be read. Memcached (pronunciation: mem-cash-dee) is a general-purpose distributed memory caching system.
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