Install Drupal Memcached on a Media Temple DV Server

Site performance is crucial to a good user experience, and also is a factor in SEO. Because Drupal sites can be very query heavy at times, their performance can suffer. Luckily, there are a few caching libraries than can solve this problem and help increase performance. In this tutorial we’re going to install the Memcached library on a Media Temple DV Server, as well as configure the Memcache API and Integration module.

Memcached is described as a…

Free & open source, high-performance, distributed memory object caching system , generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load.

Memcached is an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) from results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering.

Backup Your Server

Full disclosure, I’m not a server guy. I know basic server configuration settings, and how to navigate the server through the command line. The next steps worked for me, but becuase I’m not a server expert, I recommend you make a full backup of your server before you continue on with this tutorial.

Install Memcached on a Media Temple DV Server

If you’re like me, you probably searched “How to install Memcached on a Media Temple DV Server” and found several results. Unfortunately for me, none of them worked. Again, I’m not a server guy, so I can’t blame the authors as they did provided very details instructions. It was just that I ran into issues where I couldn’t install a certain library, or copy a directory because of they way my server is set up.

Finally, after a lot of searching I stumped upon nLightened Development’s excellent post titled Installing APC Memcached and Varnish on Media Temple DV Level 4 Centos 6.5. I want to give the author(s) of that post full credit for the commands I used to install Memcached on a Media Temple DV Server.

1. The first you will need to do is enable root access on your Media Temple DV server.
2. Next, you need to ssh into your server. To do that, run ssh root@yourdomain.com
3. You’ll be prompted for your password with something like root@yourdomain.com's password:. You will not see your password being entered when you type it, so it’s helpful to copy and paste. Hit enter.
4. Once logged in enter cd ~ to ensure you’re in the home directory.

5. Finally, run the following commands. Again, this is from nLightened Development’s excellent post titled Installing APC Memcached and Varnish on Media Temple DV Level 4 Centos 6.5

   yum install Memcached
   vim /etc/sysconfig/memcached
   
   PORT="11211"
   USER="memcached"
   MAXCONN="1024"
   CACHESIZE="64"
   OPTIONS="-l 127.0.0.1"
   
   chkconfig --add memcached
   cd /usr/local/src/
   wget http://pecl.php.net/get/memcache
   tar -xvf memcache
   cd memcache-3.0.8/
   /usr/bin/phpize
   ./configure -enable-memcache
   make
   make install
   echo “extension=memcache.so” > /etc/php.d/memcache.ini
   service httpd restart
   

6. Confirm memcache is installed by running telnet localhost 11211

7. You should get something similar to the following

   Trying ::1...
   telnet: connect to address ::1: Connection refused
   Trying 127.0.0.1...
   Connected to localhost.
   Escape character is '^]'.
   

8. Then run the following stats

9. If everything is setup correctly, you’ll get an output similar to the following

   STAT pid 518
   STAT uptime 362776
   STAT time 1449610483
   STAT version 1.4.4
   STAT pointer_size 64
   STAT rusage_user 8.143761
   STAT rusage_system 11.669226
   STAT curr_connections 5
   STAT total_connections 956
   STAT connection_structures 20
   STAT cmd_get 122913
   STAT cmd_set 29485
   STAT cmd_flush 0
   STAT get_hits 106004
   STAT get_misses 16909
   STAT delete_misses 1973
   STAT delete_hits 4647
   STAT incr_misses 0
   STAT incr_hits 0
   STAT decr_misses 0
   STAT decr_hits 0
   STAT cas_misses 0
   STAT cas_hits 0
   STAT cas_badval 0
   STAT auth_cmds 0
   STAT auth_errors 0
   STAT bytes_read 144024662
   STAT bytes_written 359296232
   STAT limit_maxbytes 67108864
   STAT accepting_conns 1
   STAT listen_disabled_num 0
   STAT threads 4
   STAT conn_yields 0
   STAT bytes 9615683
   STAT curr_items 5094
   STAT total_items 29485
   STAT evictions 0
   END
   

Edit php.ini

Now that memcached is installed on your server, you’ll need to edit your domain specific php.ini file. Since we’re dealing with a Media Temple DV, you can simply follow these steps to edit your domain specific php.ini file.

1. Once on the PHP Settings page, scroll to the Additional directives section and add the following lines.

   extension=memcache.so
   memcache.hash_strategy="consistent"
   

   Click to expand

   If this doesn’t work, you might need to also edited you global php.ini file, but I don’t believe this is necessary.

   cd ~
   nano /etc/php.ini
   

2. Then add the following

   extension=memcache.so
   memcache.hash_strategy="consistent"
   

3. Finally, restart the server by running /etc/init.d/httpd restart

Install and Enable the Drupal Memcache API and Integration Module

1. Put your site in maintenance mode by going to admin/config/development/maintenance

2. Install and enable Memcache API and Integration

   Click to expand

Edit Drupal’s settings.php

1. Add the following to your settings.php file

   $conf["cache_backends"][] = "sites/all/modules/memcache/memcache.inc";
   $conf["cache_default_class"] = "MemCacheDrupal";
   $conf["cache_class_cache_form"] = "DrupalDatabaseCache";
   $conf["memcache_servers"] = ["127.0.0.1:11211" => "default"];
   $conf["memcache_bins"] = ["cache" => "default"];
   

2. Take your site back online by going to admin/config/development/maintenance