For one of our customers, I ran into this problem as well, so I had to find a solution. I've already heared about Memcached often, but I never had the time to look into it and I was kinda scared to have to implement it in an already existing application. Afterwards, I found using the basics of memcached was pretty simple, and it boosted my page speed by 50-75%(!), only by caching doctrine queries and results.
A quick Google search found me a bundle that claims to do exactly what I want: the LswMemcacheBundle. LswMemcacheBundle is developed by LeaseWeb, which leverages the power of the PHP 'memcached' extension (not the older 'memcache' PHP extension, the d make a huge difference as explained on http://code.google.com/p/memcached/wiki/PHPClientComparison).
The installation instructions looked quite simple: install memcached, install the memcached extension and add one line to your composer.json. For Debian based systems this is the case, but CentOS 6 has some obstacles in place.
With CentOS 6 there are a couple problems:
- The php extension 'memcached' requires libmemcached. Unfortunatly the version of libmemcached in yum is to old to meet the requirements
- The php memcached extension can't be installed trough yum, so this has to be installed trough pecl
- Installing the php memcached extension trough pecl threw some errors while compiling.