When deciding between Memcached and Redis, here are a few questions to consider:
- Is object caching your primary goal, for example to offload your database? If so, use Memcached.
- Are you interested in as simple a caching model as possible? If so, use Memcached.
- Are you planning on running large cache nodes, and require multithreaded performance with utilization of multiple cores? If so, use Memcached.
- Do you want the ability to scale your cache horizontally as you grow? If so, use Memcached.
- Does your app need to atomically increment or decrement counters? If so, use either Redis or Memcached.
- Are you looking for more advanced data types, such as lists, hashes, and sets? If so, use Redis.
- Does sorting and ranking datasets in memory help you, such as with leaderboards? If so, use Redis.
- Are publish and subscribe (pub/sub) capabilities of use to your application? If so, use Redis.
- Is persistence of your key store important? If so, use Redis.