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4.1. Installing memcached

You can build and install memcached from the source code directly, or you can use an existing operating system package or installation.

Installing memcached from a Binary Distribution

To install memcached on a RedHat, or Fedora host, use yum: 

root-shell> yum install memcached

Note

On CentOS, you may be able to obtain a suitable RPM from another source, or use the source tarball.

To install memcached on a Debian or Ubuntu host, use apt-get: 

root-shell> apt-get install memcached

To install memcached on a Gentoo host, use emerge: 

root-shell> emerge install memcached

To install on OpenSolaris, use the pkg command to install the SUNWmemcached package: 

root-shell> pkg install SUNWmemcached

You may also find memcached in the Coolstack project. For more details, see http://cooltools.sunsource.net/coolstack/.

Building memcached from Source

On other Unix-based platforms, including Solaris, AIX, HP-UX and Mac OS X, and Linux distributions not mentioned already, you will need to install from source. For Linux, make sure you have a 2.6-based kernel, which includes the improved epoll interface. For all platforms, ensure that you have libevent 1.1 or higher installed. You can obtain libevent from libevent web page.

You can obtain the source for memcached from memcached Web site.

To build memcached, follow these steps:

  1. Extract the memcached source package: 

    shell> gunzip -c memcached-1.2.5.tar.gz | tar xf -

  2. Change to the memcached-1.2.5 directory: 

    shell> cd memcached-1.2.5

  3. Run configure 

    shell> ./configure

    Some additional options you may want to specify to configure:

    • --prefix

      If you want to specify a different installation directory, use the --prefix option: 

      shell> ./configure --prefix=/opt

      The default is to use the /usr/local directory.

    • --with-libevent

      If you have installed libevent and configure cannot find the library, use the --with-libevent option to specify the location of the installed library.

    • --enable-64bit

      To build a 64-bit version of memcached (which will allow you to use a single instance with a large RAM allocation), use --enable-64bit.

    • --enable-threads

      To enable multi-threading support in memcached, which will improve the response times on servers with a heavy load, use --enable-threads. You must have support for the POSIX threads within your operating system to enable thread support. For more information on the threading support, see Section 4.2.7, “memcached thread Support”.

    • --enable-dtrace

      memcached includes a range of DTrace threads that can be used to monitor and benchmark a memcached instance. For more information, see Section 4.2.5, “Using memcached and DTrace”.

  4. Run make to build memcached: 

    shell> make

  5. Run make install to install memcached: 

    shell> make install