Redis client comparison

Performance is Redis most advertized selling point. As an in-memory database it provides low-latency solutions for backend typical needs: caching, queuing, rate limiting etc.

The Redis server however is only one side of the equation, clients on the other end must be capable of using the server efficiently for the performance of the system as a whole to be great.

In this article we profiled the performance of some of the most popular clients by simulating the scenario where Redis is mostly used: internet facing servers (usually HTTP) that serve connections concurrently while receiving server pushes e.g. pubsub events. The benchmark consists of

1. starting multiple sessions that issue commands in a loop.

2. subscribing to a channel to receive pubsub events.

The following clients have been considered

Client	UIA	Stars	Contributors	Age	Lnaguage
boost-redis	64	270	14	6	C++
go-redis	1090	21800	400	13	Go
rueidis	174	2900	132	5	Go
redis-rs	495	4100	261	12	Rust
redis++	327	1900	44	8	C++
fred-rs*	94	505	1	4	Rust

Where the abbreviation UIA used above refers to the unique number of github issue authors (Unique Issue Authors)

• The fred-rs benchmark was aborted due to apparent bug or misuse of the library, which is being clarified in this issue.

Performance

The parameters used in the simulation result in the following number of requests, responses and pushes

Type	Counter	Bytes (Mb)
Requests	60M	1130
Responses	60M	390
Pushes	10M	430

Time

Client	Time (s/s)
boost-redis-asio-co	2.2
boost-redis-asio-cb	1.3
boost-redis-corosio	1
redis-rs	4.7
rueidis	-
go-redis	27.6

The table above provide the times normalized to the fastest client which was boost-redis running on corosio. The value has been computed by multiplying the wall time with the percentage of CPU usage by the client.

CPU

Client	user(%)	sys(%)
boost-redis-asio-co	65.0	3.3
boost-redis-asio-cb	46.2	2.8
boost-redis-corosio	32.5	6.2
redis-rs	98.2	1.6
rueidis	-	-
go-redis	174.0	105.1

Threads

Client	threads	fd-nr
boost-redis-asio-co	2	7
boost-redis-asio-cb	2	7
boost-redis-corosio	3	7
redis-rs	1	10
rueidis	-	-
go-redis	24	1006

Context switches

Client	context switches/s
boost-redis-asio-co	2733.56
boost-redis-asio-cb	2861.21
boost-redis-corosio	3325.44
redis-rs	25.85
rueidis
go-redis	3113.71

Cache and Branch misses

Client	cache-misses	branch-misses
boost-redis-asio-co	16,808,299	84,612,336
boost-redis-asio-cb	6,979,958	56,653,319
boost-redis-corosio	19,369,915	75,381,092
redis-rs	736,951	302,865,130
rueidis	-	-
go-redis	1,216,462,587	1,666,424,709

Build time

Time needed to build different configuration using only one process e.g. make -j1.

App build time

Client	Time(s)
boost-redis-asio-co	3.60
boost-redis-asio-cb	8.62
boost-redis-corosio	1.68
redis-rs	3.10
fred-rs	12.80
go-redis	0.28
rueidis	0.28

Client build time

Client	Time(s)
boost-redis-lib-asio	21.7
boost-redis-lib-corosio	5.3
redis-rs	9.6
fred-rs	18.7
go-redis	-
rueidis	-

NOTE: I haven't found a way to build only the client excluding the app in go.

Total build time

Client	Time(s)
boost-redis-asio-co	35.5
boost-redis-asio-cb	40.5
boost-redis-corosio	33.6
redis-rs	42.6
fred-rs	63.7
go-redis	9.0
rueidis	9.5