title: Why is ehcache faster than memcache?
body: <p>Directly quoting from ehcache's website <a href="http://ehcache.org/documentation/integrations/googleappengine" rel="nofollow">[source]</a>:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>The idea here is that your caches are set up in a cache hierarchy.
    Ehcache sits in front and memcacheg behind. Combining the two lets you
    elegantly work around limitations imposed by Google App Engine. You
    get the benefits of the speed of Ehcache together with the umlimited
    size of memcached. Ehcache contains the hooks to easily do this. To
    update memcached, use a CacheEventListener. To search against
    memcacheg on a local cache miss, use cache.getWithLoader() together
    with a CacheLoader for memcacheg.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>This seems to imply that using ehcache with memcached would be faster than using memcached alone. Why would ehcache be faster than memcached? The way I see it, both are in memory caches so why the performance difference?</p>