Redis Cheatsheet

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database
redis
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This article provides a comprehensive Redis Cheatsheet that covers fundamental Redis commands, essential operations, advanced features like batch operations, hashes, counters, and list manipulation. It also includes settings for performance and memory optimization, database management tools, replication setup, performance testing, monitoring slow queries, and managing multiple databases using Twemproxy or Codis.
Published

June 3, 2022


Redis Cheat Sheet

When you encounter a Redis instance and you quickly want to learn about the setup you just need a few simple commands to peak into the setup. Of course it doesn’t hurt to look at the official full command documentation, but below is a listing just for sysadmins.

Accessing Redis

CLI

First thing to know is that you can use “telnet” (usually on Redis default port 6379)

telnet localhost 6379

or the Redis CLI client

redis-cli

to connect to Redis. The advantage of redis-cli is that you have a help interface and command line history.

CLI Queries

Here is a short list of some basic data extraction commands:

Type Syntax and Explanation

Tracing monitor Watch current live commands. Use with care when on production. Cancel with Ctrl-C.

Slow Queries slowlog get 25 Print top 25 slow queries

slowlog len

slowlog reset

Search / List All Keys keys <pattern Use with care when on production!

keys myprefix*

keys pattern

keys *mysuffix

keys [a-c]* Use grep like expressions

Generic Key Handling del Delete key

dump Serialize key

exists Check for key

expire Set key TTL

Working with scalar types get

set

setnx Set key value only if key does not exist

Batch commands:

mget

mset

Working with counters incr

decr

Redis Lists lrange Accessing lists

lrange mylist 0 -1 Output all elements

lindex mylist 5 Get 5th element

llen mylist Get list length

lpush mylist “value” Push “value” to list

lpush mylist 5 Push number 5 to list

rpush mylist “value” Push “value” to beginning (unshift)

lpushx mylist 6 Only push if mylist exists

rpushx mylist 7

lpop mylist Remove+return value from list

rpop mylist Remove+return value from start (shift)

lrem mylist 1 “value” Remove ‘value’ count times

lset mylist 2 6 Set 3rd element to value 6

ltrim

Working with Redis Hashes hexists myhash field1 Check if hash key exists

hget myhash field1 Get key value

hdel myhash field2 Delete key

hset myhash field1 “value” Set key with “value”

hsetnx myhash field1 “value”

hgetall myhash Get all hash content

hkeys myhash List all keys

hlen myhash List number of keys

Batch commands:

hmget … Get multiple keys

hmset … Set multiple keys

Counter commands

hincrby myhash field1 1

hincrby myhash field1 5

hincrby myhash field1 -1

hincrbrfloat myhash field2 1.123445

CLI Scripting

For scripting just pass commands to “redis-cli”. For example:

$ redis-cli INFO | grep connected

connected_clients:2

connected_slaves:0

$

Server Statistics

The statistics command is “INFO” and will give you an output as following.

$ redis-cli INFO

redis_version:2.2.12

redis_git_sha1:00000000

redis_git_dirty:0

arch_bits:64

multiplexing_api:epoll

process_id:8353

uptime_in_seconds:2592232

uptime_in_days:30

lru_clock:809325

used_cpu_sys:199.20

used_cpu_user:309.26

used_cpu_sys_children:12.04

used_cpu_user_children:1.47

connected_clients:2 # <—- connection count

connected_slaves:0

client_longest_output_list:0

client_biggest_input_buf:0

blocked_clients:0

used_memory:6596112

used_memory_human:6.29M # <—- memory usage

used_memory_rss:17571840

mem_fragmentation_ratio:2.66

use_tcmalloc:0

loading:0

aof_enabled:0

changes_since_last_save:0

bgsave_in_progress:0

last_save_time:1371241671

bgrewriteaof_in_progress:0

total_connections_received:118

total_commands_processed:1091

expired_keys:441

evicted_keys:0

keyspace_hits:6

keyspace_misses:1070

hash_max_zipmap_entries:512

hash_max_zipmap_value:64

pubsub_channels:0

pubsub_patterns:0

vm_enabled:0

role:master # <—- master/slave in replication setup

db0:keys=91,expires=88

Changing Runtime Configuration

The command

CONFIG GET *

gives you a list of all active configuration variables you can change. The output might look like this:

redis 127.0.0.1:6379> CONFIG GET *

  1. “dir”

  2. “/var/lib/redis”

  3. “dbfilename”

  4. “dump.rdb”

  5. “requirepass”

  6. (nil)

  7. “masterauth”

  8. (nil)

  9. “maxmemory”

  10. “0”

  11. “maxmemory-policy”

  12. “volatile-lru”

  13. “maxmemory-samples”

  14. “3”

  15. “timeout”

  16. “300”

  17. “appendonly”

  18. “no”

  19. “no-appendfsync-on-rewrite”

  20. “no”

  21. “appendfsync”

  22. “everysec” # <—- how often fsync() is called

  23. “save”

  24. “900 1 300 10 60 10000” # <—- how often Redis dumps in background

  25. “slave-serve-stale-data”

  26. “yes”

  27. “hash-max-zipmap-entries”

  28. “512”

  29. “hash-max-zipmap-value”

  30. “64”

  31. “list-max-ziplist-entries”

  32. “512”

  33. “list-max-ziplist-value”

  34. “64”

  35. “set-max-intset-entries”

  36. “512”

  37. “slowlog-log-slower-than”

  38. “10000”

  39. “slowlog-max-len”

  40. “64”

Note that keys and values are alternating and you can change each key by issuing a “CONFIG SET” command like:

CONFIG SET timeout 900

Such a change will be effective instantly. When changing values consider also updating the redis configuration file.

Databases

Multiple Databases

Redis has a concept of separated namespaces called “databases”. You can select the database number you want to use with “SELECT”. By default the database with index 0 is used. So issuing

redis 127.0.0.1:6379> SELECT 1

OK

redis 127.0.0.1:6379[1]>

switches to the second database. Note how the prompt changed and now has a “[1]” to indicate the database selection. To find out how many databases there are you might want to run redis-cli from the shell:

$ redis-cli INFO | grep ^db

db0:keys=91,expires=88

db1:keys=1,expires=0

Dropping Databases

To drop the currently selected database run

FLUSHDB

to drop all databases at once run

FLUSHALL

Replication

Checking for Replication

To see if the instance is a replication slave or master issue

redis 127.0.0.1:6379> INFO

[…]

role:master

and watch for the “role” line which shows either “master” or “slave”. Starting with version 2.8 the “INFO” command also gives you per slave replication status looking like this

slave0:ip=127.0.0.1,port=6380,state=online,offset=281,lag=0

Setting up Replication

If you quickly need to set up replication just issue

SLAVEOF

on a machine that you want to become slave of the given IP. It will immediately get values from the master. Note that this instance will still be writable. If you want it to be read-only change the redis config file (only available in most recent version, e.g. not on Debian). To revert the slave setting run

SLAVEOF NO ONE

Performance Testing

Benchmark

Install the Redis tools and run the provided benchmarking tool

redis-benchmark -h [-p ]

If you are migrating from/to memcached protocol check out how to run the same benchmark for any key value store with memcached protocol.

Debugging Latency

First measure system latency on your Redis server with

redis-cli –intrinsic-latency 100

and then sample from your Redis clients with

redis-cli –latency -h -p

If you have problems with high latency check if transparent huge pages are disabled. Disable it with

echo never > /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled

Dump Database Backup

As Redis allows RDB database dumps in background, you can issue a dump at any time. Just run:

BGSAVE

When running this command Redis will fork and the new process will dump into the “dbfilename” configured in the Redis configuration without the original process being blocked. Of course the fork itself might cause an interruption. Use “LASTSAVE” to check when the dump file was last updated. For a simple backup solution just backup the dump file. If you need a synchronous save run “SAVE” instead of “BGSAVE”.

Listing Connections

Starting with version 2.4 you can list connections with

CLIENT LIST

and you can terminate connections with

CLIENT KILL :

Monitoring Traffic

The propably most useful command compared to memcached where you need to trace network traffic is the “MONITOR” command which will dump incoming commands in real time.

redis 127.0.0.1:6379> MONITOR

OK

1371241093.375324 “monitor”

1371241109.735725 “keys” “*”

1371241152.344504 “set” “testkey” “1”

1371241165.169184 “get” “testkey”

additionally use “SLOWLOG” to track the slowest queries in an interval. For example

SLOWLOG RESET

wait for some time

SLOWLOG GET 25

and get the 25 slowest command during this time.

Sharding with proxies

There are two major proxy solutions

Twemproxy (aka nutcracker, by Twitter)

Codis