Memcached is a free and open-source distributed memory caching system that can be used to speed up dynamic web applications by reducing database load. It stores objects in memory to return frequently or recently used results very quickly. Common things to cache include query results, objects with heavy calculations, and anything that takes time to generate like database calls, API calls, or page rendering. The memcached client knows all memcached servers and hashes keys to determine which server to store or retrieve each object from. Objects are stored using keys and have a maximum size of 1MB. Commands like get, set, add, delete are used to interact with the cache.