How To Install Memcached on Rocky Linux 9

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Memcached on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory caching system. It is designed to speed up web applications by caching data in memory, reducing the number of times an application has to retrieve data from a slower data store such as a database. You can use Memcached in PHP-based applications including WordPress and Joomla to run smoothly without much latency.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Memcached caching data in memory on Rocky Linux. 9.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Rocky Linux 9.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• An active internet connection. You’ll need an internet connection to download the necessary packages and dependencies for Memcached.
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Memcached on Rocky Linux 9

Step 1. The first step is to update your system to the latest version of the package list. To do so, run the following commands:

sudo dnf check-update
sudo dnf install dnf-utils

Step 2. Installing Memcached on Rocky Linux 9.

By default, Memcached is available on Rocky Linux 9 AppStream repository. Now run the following command below to install the latest version of Memcached on your Rocky Linux system:

sudo dnf install memcached libmemcached

Now, start and enable the Memcached service using the following command below:

sudo systemctl enable memcached --now
sudo systemctl status memcached

Let’s check the version:

memcached --version

Step 3. Configure Memcached.

You can configure Memcached by editing the /etc/sysconfig/memcached configuration file. You can adjust settings such as the amount of memory to be used for caching and the number of concurrent connections. For example:

nano /etc/sysconfig/memcached

The default configuration is shown below. You can change it per your requirements:

PORT="11211"
USER="memcached"
MAXCONN="1024"
CACHESIZE="64"
OPTIONS="-l 127.0.0.1,::1"

Save and close the file, then restart the Memcached service to apply the changes:

sudo systemctl restart memcached

Step 4. Configure Firewall.

If you are using firewalld on your Rocky Linux system, then you will need to allow ports 11211 and 80 through the firewalld. You can allow them by running the following command below:

sudo firewall-cmd --add-port=11211/tcp --zone=public --permanent
sudo firewall-cmd --add-port=80/tcp --zone=public --permanent
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

You can now list all firewalld ports using the following command:

firewall-cmd --list-ports

FAQ About Memcached

Q: How do I check the Memcached version?

A: You can check the version of Memcached by running the following command in the terminal: memcached -h

Q: How do I clear the Memcached cache?

A: You can clear the Memcached cache by running the following command in the terminal: echo "flush_all" | nc localhost 11211

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Memcached. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Memcached caching data in memory on your Rocky Linux 9 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Memcached website.