How to install Memcached on Xampp on Windows 7

For one of my Zend Framework web applications I’m going to install memcached. I am currently using file cache however think memcached is a much better way to go. This post is one in a series:

1. Installing Memcached on Windows 7 and Xampp
2. Setting up Memcached Cache in Zend Framework
3. Installing Memcached on Centos 5.

Installing Memcached on Xampp and Windows 7

1a. Go to your php.ini file usually located in C:/xampp/php/php.ini
find this line:

;extension=php_memcache.dll

and replace it with:

extension=php_memcache.dll

1b. If you cannot find this line simply add the following line to below where all the ;extension= lines.

extension=php_memcache.dll

2.  Add the following to just below the new line

[Memcache]
memcache.allow_failover = 1
memcache.max_failover_attempts=20
memcache.chunk_size =8192
memcache.default_port = 11211

3. Download the necessary php_memecache.dll file from the following location.

http://downloads.php.net/pierre/

For windows 7 I used the following file:

http://downloads.php.net/pierre/php_memcache-cvs-20090703-5.3-VC6-x86.zip

4. Unzip the php_memcache.dll file and put it into your php ext folder. Usually C:/xampp/php/ext/

5. Download memcached for windows here (make sure it’s the win32 binary):

http://code.jellycan.com/memcached/

6. Unzip and put the memcache.exe file into a desired directory (e.g. c:/memcached/)

7. Open command line in Windows Administrator Mode.

Click start, type in ‘Search programs and Files’ box, wait for the program cmd.exe to appear, right hand click on the icon and select run as administrator

8. Install the memcache service

Type the following into the command line

c:\memcached\memcached.exe -d install

If you dont get any errors it means it’s worked.

9. Start memcached

Type the following into the command line

c:\memcached\memcached.exe -d start, or net start “memcached Server”

10. Restart Xampp Apache

11. Test Memcache

Create a php file and paste the following code. Then go to the page. If you do not see any errors then it has worked.

<?php
$memcache = new Memcache;
$memcache->connect('localhost', 11211) or die ("Could not connect");

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

$tmp_object = new stdClass;
$tmp_object->str_attr = 'test';
$tmp_object->int_attr = 123;

$memcache->set('key', $tmp_object, false, 10) or 
die ("Failed to save data at the server");
echo "Store data in the cache (data will expire in 10 seconds)
<br/>\n";

$get_result = $memcache->get('key');
echo "Data from the cache:<br/>\n";

var_dump($get_result);
?>

12. Just in case it doesn’t work: One other thing I did was to run the C:/memcached/memcached.exe file as administrator. This opens the ports on the windows firewall which might solve some problems.

Related posts:

1. Install Python and Django with Xampp on Windows 7
2. Installing Memcached on Centos 5
3. Install APC on Xampp
4. How to Enable SSL on Xampp with Vhosts
5. Enable mod_rewrite in xampp