memcached is great, is lightning fast, very versatile and useful, scalable, and is a must have for many projects
but if you only want speed to minimize session file blocking there is also a good alternative, tmpfs
https://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 sessions
you 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 task
i 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-fpm
the 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-backup
you 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 here
https://blog.jmdawson.co.uk/persistent-ramdisk-on-debain-ubuntu/