Memcache is a high-performance distributed memory caching system that stores data and objects in memory to improve performance of dynamic web applications by reducing database queries. It provides fast APIs, uses a hash table for data storage, implements LRU for cache eviction, and has a high performance slab allocator. However, it lacks access control and security features. Memcache is installed via packages and configured in PHP using the memcache extension. Common operations like get, set, add, delete allow caching of query results in memcache to improve response times.