memcached is great, is lightning fast, very versatile and useful, scalable, and is a must have for many projectsbut if you only want speed to minimize session file blocking there is also a good alternative, tmpfshttps://eddmann.com/posts/storing-php-sessions-file-caches-in-memory-using-tmpfs/maybe if you are in debian you already had session directory in tmp (mounted as tmpfs), but beware of daily cleaning process that can mess up your sessionsyou can use this trick if you are in centos/other (like me) or even if you are in debian but want to get ride of /tmp cleaning taski realized in my system /run is also mounted as tmpfs, so i shut php-fpm down, moved my php session dir to /tmp/, reconfigure php and start again... (you can adapt it to your situation) systemctl stop php-fpm cp -a /var/lib/php/session /tmp/php-session vim /etc/php-fpm-d/www.conf ------ php_value[session.save_path] = /run/php-session ------ systemctl start php-fpmthe only drawback is tmpfs is VOLATILE, just like memcached (data is lost on unmount/shutdown/power fail), to circumvent this risk i wrote another service that restores/backup php session dir before/after php starts/stops... (UNTESTED!) vim /etc/systemd/system/php-session-backup.service ------ # basic persistence for tmpfs php sessions [Unit] Description=PHP tmpfs sessions backup/restore on shutdown/boot Before=php-fpm.service [Service] Type=oneshot RemainAfterExit=true ExecStart=rm -fr /run/php-session ExecStart=cp -fa /var/lib/php/session /run/php-session ExecStop=rm -fr /var/lib/php/session ExecStop=cp -fa /run/php-session /var/lib/php/session [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target ------ systemctl enable php-session-backupyou can also complement this with a daily backup task in case of system crash so you will lose just one day crontab -e ------ 0 4 * * * rm -fr /var/lib/php/session;cp -fa /run/php-session /var/lib/php/session ------this is very rough though, you can better use inotify + rsync, could take some ideas from herehttps://blog.jmdawson.co.uk/persistent-ramdisk-on-debain-ubuntu/