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

Valkey, the community fork of Redis, has significantly outperformed Redis 8.0 in benchmarks one year after its creation. In tests on AWS c8g.2xl instances, Valkey 8.1.1 achieved 999.8K RPS compared to Redis 8.0's 729.4K RPS. The performance gains come from improved I/O threading implementation and optimizations like CPU pinning and IRQ handling. The article provides detailed benchmarking methodology and configuration tips for reproducing the results, highlighting how the open-source community response to Redis Inc's licensing changes has led to meaningful technical improvements.