Pretty basic article, but yes, Memcache is awesome. With a PHP/Memcache/Nginx stack I was able to make a massive traffic site work on the smallest-possible EC2

Pretty basic article, but yes, Memcache is awesome. With a PHP/Memcache/Nginx stack I was able to make a massive traffic site work on the smallest-possible EC2 server. But there are two things that are even more important when running PHP: a good FastCGI server (such as PHP-FPM) and an opcode cache like APC. Without those two, the PHP CGI execution model would be pure insanity; not only would it restart the entire process for each request, it would also recompile every file. I think it's sad that those measures are not standard in every PHP environment, but then again they're not particularly difficult to configure...