Valkey Turns One: How the Community Fork Left Redis in the Dust

In May 2025, the open-source community saw significant developments following Redis Inc's controversial decision to close the source of Redis, which led to the emergence of Valkey, a community-driven fork. The return of Redis's original creator, Salvatore Sanfilippo, marked an attempt to rebuild trust, and Redis 8.0 has been open-sourced again. Valkey, benefiting from community contributions such as AWS's Async I/O Threading model, has thrived, demonstrating higher throughput and lower latency than Redis 8.0 in benchmarks. While neither Valkey nor Redis 8.0 sustained 1 million requests per second (RPS) on an 8 VCPU instance, Valkey achieved nearly 1 million RPS with optimized settings. The benchmark tests revealed that Valkey outperformed Redis in both read and write operations, highlighting the importance of I/O threading and CPU core pinning in enhancing performance. These experiments emphasized the role of community collaboration and technical expertise in pushing the performance boundaries of these systems.