Pieter Noordhuis: Redis in Practice

Pieter Noordhuis: Redis in Practice, at the PyGrunn conference in Groningen, The Netherlands. Organized by Paylogic and Goldmund Wyldebeast & Wunderliebe.

Redis is a key-value store. It can be compared to memcached. But it natively supports strings, lists, sets, sorted sets and hashes. Everything is stored in memory, so that puts a limit on what you can put in it but also makes it very fast. You can also persist it though, unlike memcached. Supports replication, so you can have one master that you write to and say fifty slaves just for reading.

Any blob will do: ascii, utf-8, png. Example:

redis> set str "hello world"
OK
redis> get str
"hello world"

It runs in a single thread: no race conditions or locks; every operation is atomic. This greatly simplifies replication.

Invalidate immediately:

redis> del page:/home
(integer) 1

You can have rate limiting:

INCR limit
EXPIRE limit 60 # iff INCR == 1

Lists are a natural fit: RPUSH a new job (push it at the right of the list) and LPOP a job from the left of the list. With PubSub you can set up some notifications when jobs are done.

Sets: unordered sets of unique values. Ordered Sets of unique values: ZADD an item to increase its score, ZREM to decrease it. You can use this easily to show currently logged in users, top users for some measurement, etc.

We can do 100,000 gets and sets per second on commodity hardware. With tweaking and better hardware we have heard of 1.5 million per second.

You can have durability through snapshotting: save every N seconds or every N changes.

Getting started: http://redis.io/download, no dependencies, make it and you are done.