Redis 8.6 Improves Throughput by More Than Five Times Over Redis 7.2

Less than three months after the 8.4 release, Redis 8.6 is now officially available. This new version of the distributed in-memory key-value store builds on the Redis 8.0 foundation and delivers major performance and efficiency gains.

According to the release benchmarks, Redis 8.6 achieves over five times the throughput of Redis 7.2 in caching workloads. With pipelining enabled, it can reach up to 3.5 million operations per second.

Performance improvements over Redis 8.4 include:

• Up to 35% lower latency for sorted set commands
• Up to 15% improvement for GET on short strings
• Up to 11% faster list commands
• Up to 7% faster hash commands

Memory efficiency has also improved, with reductions of up to 17% for hashes and 31% for sorted sets.

Redis Streams now support at-most-once message delivery. Producers can attach idempotent identifiers to messages, allowing Redis to detect and discard duplicates if messages are resent due to crashes or network issues.

Two new eviction policies have been added: volatile-lrm and allkeys-lrm. These remove keys based on the least recently modified criteria. Read operations do not affect recency. The volatile policy targets only keys with expiration times, while allkeys applies to the entire dataset.

Redis 8.6 also introduces built-in hot key detection, with new commands that track CPU and network usage per key within specific hash slots, helping identify the most resource-intensive keys.

Security improvements include simplified mutual TLS authentication. Clients can now be automatically authenticated using the Common Name in their TLS certificates, removing the need for explicit AUTH commands. ACL users can also be configured without passwords.

Time series functionality has been enhanced to support NaN values. The TS.ADD and TS.MADD commands now accept NaN to represent missing data. Existing aggregations ignore NaN values, while new aggregators can count both NaN values and total samples.

Redis 8.6 is available through Docker Hub (Alpine and Debian images), Snap, Homebrew, RPM, and APT repositories.