50 Million Sorted Sets, Round Three: Redis Still Chasing Valkey

A reproducible benchmark of 50 million members inserted into a single sorted set compared six Redis releases and five Valkey releases on the same Graviton4 host using pipelined ZADD operations. Older releases of both projects used about 4.83 GB, or roughly 97 bytes per member, while Redis reduced usage to 3.73 GB and improved insertion throughput beginning with version 8.6; Valkey reached a similar 3.77 GB in version 8.1 and further reduced consumption to 3.34 GB, about 67 bytes per member, in version 9.1.2, which also produced the highest measured insertion rate at roughly 647,000 operations per second. The memory improvements are attributed to Valkey changes that eliminated duplicate sorted-set mappings and later embedded member strings in skiplist nodes, with Redis 8.6 adapting the first of these designs while retaining its own dictionary implementation. The comparison is limited to one large skiplist-encoded sorted set with short members, integer scores, allocator-level memory accounting, and one pipelined client, so results may differ for other workloads.

Use this post, company, and trend context to find content marketing opportunities, perform competitive analysis, or address product feature gaps via the Plushcap MCP server or the Plushcap API.