How to use memcached in Django?

What is a cache?

cache is a reserved storage location that collects temporary data to help websites, browsers, and apps load faster.

Why Memcached?

Memcached is a free, open-source, high-performance, distributed memory object caching system. Memcached is used to speed up dynamic web applications by reducing the database load.

Integration Django with Memcache:

• In your Django project, under settings.py, add the following code in the bottom of the file.

SESSIONS_ENGINE='django.contrib.sessions.backends.cache'

CACHES = {
    'default': {
        'BACKEND': 'django.core.cache.backends.memcached.MemcachedCache',
        'LOCATION': '127.0.0.1:11211',
    }

• Install memcached client for Python with your virtual environment active.

pip install python-memcached

• Download Memcached using one of the following download links and extract it to a particular folder

1. http://downloads.northscale.com/memcached-win32-1.4.4-14.zip
2. http://downloads.northscale.com/memcached-win64-1.4.4-14.zip

• Open Memcached folder in the terminal, then Run the following command (-m is for the amount of memory you want to dedicate and -vvv is for extreme verbose).

.\memcached.exe -m 512 -vvv

• Lets implement cache in Django application in views.py

from django.core.cache import cache
from .models import school
def my_view(request):
    cache_key = 'stack' # needs to be unique
    cache_time = 60 # time in seconds for cache to be valid
    data = cache.get(cache_key) # returns None if no key-value pair
    if not data:
        data = school.objects.all()
    
    cache.set(cache_key, data, cache_time)
return JsonResponse(data, safe=False)

• start the server and you should get much better results.