How to install Memcached on Windows machine

After some research I found that there is a Win32 binary version of memcached available here.
So go there and download win32 binary version to your computer. When downloaded, extract the file to folder memcahced on your C partition.
You should get only one file named memcached.exe. Now we need to install this as a service, as memCached is daemon and should be run only as service.
To install Memcached as a service, follow these steps (please change all forward slashes to backslashes):

1. If you’re running Vista, you should set memcached.exe to Run as administrator
2. Install the service using the command:

   1	c:/memcached/memcached.exe  -d install

   from the command prompt
3. Start the server from the Services or by running one of the following commands:

   1	c:/memcached/memcached.exe -d  start

   or
   

   1	net start "memcached Server"

That is it, now your memcached server is installed and is listening to port 11211. There is one more thing left to do. By default, server is set to 64Mb memory limit, which is too small. To correct, go to Registry Editor and find key

1	HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services/memcached  Server .

Change the ImagePath entry to:

1	“C:/memcached/memcached.exe” -d runservice -m 512

This way you will use 512 Mb memory limit for your server.
If you are using WAMP, then just turn on php_memcache extension in it. Now we are ready to go testing.
The simplest test is to write something to memcache that will expire in 30 seconds, and then try to retrieve the value from cache.
So write this into your test file:

01

<?php

02	$memcache = new Memcache; // instantiating memcache extension class

03	$memcache->connect("localhost",11211); // try 127.0.0.1 instead of localhost

04	// if it is not working

05

06	echo "Server's version: " . $memcache->getVersion() . "<br />\n";

07

08	// we will create an array which will be stored in cache serialized

09	$testArray = array('horse', 'cow', 'pig');

10	$tmp       = serialize($testArray);

11

12	$memcache->add("key", $tmp, 30);

13

14	echo "Data from the cache:<br />\n";

15	print_r(unserialize($memcache->get("key")));

16

?>

If everything went ok, you should see your array written out of memcache. Now you can use this powerful caching mechanism to develop really fast PHP applications. If you need to know more, go to PHP manual Memcached page