Dragonfly Has a Free API: The Redis-Compatible In-Memory Store That Uses 25x Less Memory

Why Dragonfly

Dragonfly is a modern Redis replacement — fully compatible but uses 25x less memory for the same dataset. Multi-threaded architecture means it scales vertically on modern hardware.

Quick Start

docker run -d -p 6379:6379 docker.dragonflydb.io/dragonflydb/dragonfly

# Use any Redis client
redis-cli -p 6379

Full Redis Compatibility

# All Redis commands work
SET user:123 '{"name": "Alice", "plan": "premium"}'
GET user:123
HSET product:456 name "Widget" price 29.99 stock 100
HGETALL product:456
LPUSH queue:orders "order-789"
BRPOP queue:orders 0
SADD tags:post:1 "javascript" "nodejs" "api"
SMEMBERS tags:post:1

Why Dragonfly Uses Less Memory

Dragonfly uses a novel memory management approach:

• Dashtable — custom hash table more memory-efficient than Redis dict
• No forking — snapshots without copy-on-write memory doubling
• Multi-threaded — shared-nothing architecture uses all CPU cores

Benchmark

Dataset: 1 billion keys
Redis:     ~120 GB RAM
Dragonfly: ~5 GB RAM (25x less)
Throughput: 4M ops/sec (vs Redis 100K single-threaded)

Key Features

• Redis compatible — drop-in replacement
• 25x less memory — for same dataset
• Multi-threaded — uses all CPU cores
• No fork — consistent latency during snapshots
• Memcached compatible — dual protocol
• Open source — BSL license

Resources

• Dragonfly Docs
• GitHub

---

Need to extract cache data, benchmark metrics, or database stats? Check out my Apify tools or email [e-mail] for custom solutions.