Factors impacting Redis performance
There are multiple factors having direct consequences on Redis performance. We mention them here, since they can alter the result of any benchmarks. Please note however, that a typical Redis instance running on a low end, untuned box usually provides good enough performance for most applications.
Network bandwidth and latency
Network bandwidth and latency usually have a direct impact on the performance.
It is a good practice to use the ping program to quickly check the latency between the client and server hosts is normal before launching the benchmark.
Regarding the bandwidth, it is generally useful to estimate the throughput in Gbit/s and compare it to the theoretical bandwidth of the network. For instance a benchmark setting 4 KB strings in Redis at 100000 q/s, would actually consume 3.2 Gbit/s of bandwidth and probably fit within a 10 Gbit/s link, but not a 1 Gbit/s one. In many real world scenarios, Redis throughput is limited by the network well before being limited by the CPU. To consolidate several high-throughput Redis instances on a single server, it worth considering putting a 10 Gbit/s NIC or multiple 1 Gbit/s NICs with TCP/IP bonding.
But from another pespective, if bottleneck is NIC, it means that there is no obvious bottleneck at CPU. And thus upgrade the NIC could improve the performance.
But sometimes, if we use 10Gb/s NIC, but somehow the network throughput cannot close to 10Gb/s, and the performance analysis becomes more complex.
$ redis-benchmark -h 192.168.18.128 -c 100 -r 1 -l -t set -d 4000
Summary:
throughput summary: 79113.92 requests per second
latency summary (msec):
avg min p50 p95 p99 max
0.736 0.256 0.743 0.791 0.863 7.535
^RT: rps=104100.0 (overall: 100567.6) avg_msec=0.568 (overall: 0.585)
^CT: rps=100318.7 (overall: 100467.0) avg_msec=0.583 (overall: 0.584)
CPU
CPU is another very important factor. Being single-threaded, Redis favors fast CPUs with large caches and not many cores. At this game, Intel CPUs are currently the winners. It is not uncommon to get only half the performance on an AMD Opteron CPU compared to similar Nehalem EP/Westmere EP/Sandy Bridge Intel CPUs with Redis. When client and server run on the same box, the CPU is the limiting factor with redis-benchmark.
RAM
- Speed of RAM and memory bandwidth seem less critical for global performance especially for small objects. For large objects (>10 KB), it may become noticeable though. Usually, it is not really cost-effective to buy expensive fast memory modules to optimize Redis.
Misc
- Redis runs slower on a VM compared to running without virtualization using the same hardware. If you have the chance to run Redis on a physical machine this is preferred. However this does not mean that Redis is slow in virtualized environments, the delivered performances are still very good and most of the serious performance issues you may incur in virtualized environments are due to over-provisioning, non-local disks with high latency, or old hypervisor software that have slow
forksyscall implementation. - When the server and client benchmark programs run on the same box, both the TCP/IP loopback and unix domain sockets can be used. Depending on the platform, unix domain sockets can achieve around 50% more throughput than the TCP/IP loopback (on Linux for instance). The default behavior of redis-benchmark is to use the TCP/IP loopback.
- The performance benefit of unix domain sockets compared to TCP/IP loopback tends to decrease when pipelining is heavily used (i.e. long pipelines).
- When an ethernet network is used to access Redis, aggregating commands using pipelining is especially efficient when the size of the data is kept under the ethernet packet size (about 1500 bytes). Actually, processing 10 bytes, 100 bytes, or 1000 bytes queries almost result in the same throughput. See the graph below.
- On multi CPU sockets servers, Redis performance becomes dependent on the NUMA configuration and process location. The most visible effect is that redis-benchmark results seem non-deterministic because client and server processes are distributed randomly on the cores. To get deterministic results, it is required to use process placement tools (on Linux: taskset or numactl). The most efficient combination is always to put the client and server on two different cores of the same CPU to benefit from the L3 cache. Here are some results of 4 KB SET benchmark for 3 server CPUs (AMD Istanbul, Intel Nehalem EX, and Intel Westmere) with different relative placements. Please note this benchmark is not meant to compare CPU models between themselves (CPUs exact model and frequency are therefore not disclosed).
- With high-end configurations, the number of client connections is also an important factor. Being based on epoll/kqueue, the Redis event loop is quite scalable. Redis has already been benchmarked at more than 60000 connections, and was still able to sustain 50000 q/s in these conditions. As a rule of thumb, an instance with 30000 connections can only process half the throughput achievable with 100 connections. Here is an example showing the throughput of a Redis instance per number of connections:
