Memcache vs PHP Memcache
or Memcache vs. Memcached
It seems that PHP has two memcached libraries named memcache and memcached. What is the difference and how do you know which one to use? The newer memcached PHP extension was created recently by some guys at Digg. It has some new features and performance enhancements.
Here is a quick backgrounder in naming conventions (for those unfamiliar), which explains the frustration by the question asker: For many *nix applications, the piece that does the backend work is called a “daemon” (think “service” in Windows-land), while the interface or client application is what you use to control or access the daemon. The daemon is most often named the same as the client, with the letter “d” appended to it. For example “imap” would be a client that connects to the “imapd” daemon.
This naming convention is clearly being adhered to by memcache when you read the introduction to the memcache module (notice the distinction between memcache and memcached in this excerpt):
Memcache module provides handy procedural and object oriented interface to memcached, highly effective caching daemon, which was especially designed to decrease database load in dynamic web applications.