<b>This week in caching: Memcached vs Redis, past the meme</b>

<b>This week in caching: Memcached vs Redis, past the meme</b>
The comparison everyone has an opinion on, done carefully:
— <i>When Memcached actually wins</i> — multithreaded, slab allocation, lower memory overhead per key for pure string KV; not dead, just specialized.
— <i>Redis data structures as a cache feature</i> — sorted sets for leaderboards, hashes for partial updates without re-serializing the whole object.
— <i>Memory fragmentation realities</i> — jemalloc behavior and why your RSS dwarfs your dataset.
— <i>Eviction policies that matter</i> — allkeys-lru vs allkeys-lfu and the workload where LFU quietly outperforms.
Credits to the Redis and Memcached maintainer docs.
Bookmark: the slab-allocation explainer — the reason Memcached still ships in 2026.