Set up Memcached as a service

From: http://www.lullabot.com/articles/installing-memcached-redhat-or-centos (Lullabot)

Just having memcache installed will not do anything by itself, we need to actually start up some instances of it for our web server to connect to, and we need memcached to automatically start up when the server restarts.

For this we need to install a new script at /etc/init.d/memcached. For this I usually use a custom script that's a bit crude, since it assumes that memcached is being used exclusively for our web server. However, most of the time this is true and it works just fine.

Download the memcached script (rename to just "memcached").

So simply load this script into /etc/init.d. Then set the permissions on it to make it executable:

$ chmod 755 memcached

Then register the script to start up with the server:

$ chkconfig --add memcached

Now you can start up memcached as a service.

$ service memcached start

And you can confirm that memcached has fired up several instances by checking ps.

$ ps -e | grep memcached
22805 ?        00:00:59 memcached
22807 ?        00:00:58 memcached
22809 ?        00:01:16 memcached
22811 ?        00:00:55 memcached
22813 ?        00:00:01 memcached
22815 ?        00:01:02 memcached
22817 ?        00:00:27 memcached
22819 ?        00:00:35 memcached
22821 ?        00:00:01 memcached
22823 ?        00:00:01 memcached
22825 ?        00:00:01 memcached

And that's it! You may need to change the /etc/init.d/memcached file to match your needs depending on what you're using Memcached for. If you're using Memcached with Drupal, you can follow the instructions for changing your settings.php file by following the instructions provided with the Memcache module. Also make sure you configure your Firewall to prevent access to Memcache from external URLs.