Configuring Memcached for session caching

As Magento 2 does not support Redis session caching from the beginning, we need to use Memcached instead. Memcached has been around for a long time and was used in Magento 1, since the beginning, as backend and session caching.

Memcached is a distributed memory caching system. It is a flexible in-memory storage container to cache data. As the session handler in the PHP Redis does not support session locking, we use Memcached instead. Keep in mind that Memcached is not persisted, so after restarting the server or daemon, all the data is gone. This could have an impact on a production environment—lost sessions or baskets.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we will use a Droplet created in Chapter 2, Magento 2 System Tools, at DigitalOcean, https://www.digitalocean.com/. We will be using NGINX, PHP-FPM, and a Composer-based setup including sample data connected to a Memcached server. No other prerequisites are required.

How to do it…

For the purpose of this...