In this first half of a two-part article focusing on memcached and Grails,
author James Goodwill introduces you to the open source caching solution memcached.
Topics covered in this article include installation, configuration, memcached client
commands, and evaluating the effectiveness of your cache. Unlike articles about using
memcached with a language-specific client, this one focuses on direct interaction with
the memcached server. The goal is to give you the tools you need to monitor your
instance of memcached as well as to prepare you for the second half of the article, in which you will integrate memcached into a Grails application.