As my previous post suggested I'd been running a service for a few years, using Redis as a key-value store.

Redis is lovely. If your dataset will fit in RAM. Otherwise it dies hard.

Inspired by Memcached, which is a simple key=value store, redis allows for more operations: using sets, using hashes, etc, etc.

As it transpires I mostly set keys to values, so it crossed my mind last night an alternative to rewriting the service to use a non-RAM-constrained service might be to juggle redis out and replace it with something else.

If it were possible to have a redis-compatible API which secretly stored the data in leveldb, sqlite, or even Berkley DB, then that would solve my problem of RAM-constraints, and also be useful.

Looking around there are a few projects in this area nds fork of redis, ssdb, etc.

I was hoping to find a Perl Redis::Server module, but sadly nothing exists. I should look at the various node.js stub-servers which exist as they might be easy to hack too.

Anyway the short version is that this might be a way forward, the real solution might be to use sqlite or postgres, but that would take a few days work. For the moment the service has been moved to a donated guest and has 2Gb of RAM instead of the paltry 512Mb it was running on previously.

Happily the server is installed/maintained by my slaughter tool so reinstalling took about ten minutes - the only hard part was migrating the Redis-contents, and that's trivial thanks to the integrated "slave of" support. (I should write that up regardless though.)

Tags: blogspam, redis | 5 comments