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Redis

This page provides a technical description of Redis persistence, it is a suggested read for all the Redis users. For a wider overview of Redis persistence and the durability guarantees it provides you may want to also read Redis persistence demystified.

Redis Persistence

Redis provides a different range of persistence options:

The most important thing to understand is the different trade-offs between the RDB and AOF persistence. Let's start with RDB:

RDB advantages

RDB disadvantages

AOF advantages

AOF disadvantages

Ok, so what should I use?

The general indication is that you should use both persistence methods if you want a degree of data safety comparable to what PostgreSQL can provide you.

If you care a lot about your data, but still can live with a few minutes of data lose in case of disasters, you can simply use RDB alone.

There are many users using AOF alone, but we discourage it since to have an RDB snapshot from time to time is a great idea for doing database backups, for faster restarts, and in the event of bugs in the AOF engine.

Note: for all these reasons we'll likely end up unifying AOF and RDB into a single persistence model in the future (long term plan).

The following sections will illustrate a few more details about the two persistence models.

Snapshotting

By default Redis saves snapshots of the dataset on disk, in a binary file called dump.rdb. You can configure Redis to have it save the dataset every N seconds if there are at least M changes in the dataset, or you can manually call the SAVE or BGSAVE commands.

For example, this configuration will make Redis automatically dump the dataset to disk every 60 seconds if at least 1000 keys changed:

save 60 1000

This strategy is known as snapshotting.

How it works

Whenever Redis needs to dump the dataset to disk, this is what happens:

This method allows Redis to benefit from copy-on-write semantics.

Append-only file

Snapshotting is not very durable. If your computer running Redis stops, your power line fails, or you accidentally kill -9 your instance, the latest data written on Redis will get lost. While this may not be a big deal for some applications, there are use cases for full durability, and in these cases Redis was not a viable option.

The append-only file is an alternative, fully-durable strategy for Redis. It became available in version 1.1.

You can turn on the AOF in your configuration file:

appendonly yes

From now on, every time Redis receives a command that changes the dataset (e.g. SET) it will append it to the AOF. When you restart Redis it will re-play the AOF to rebuild the state.

Log rewriting

As you can guess, the AOF gets bigger and bigger as write operations are performed. For example, if you are incrementing a counter 100 times, you'll end up with a single key in your dataset containing the final value, but 100 entries in your AOF. 99 of those entries are not needed to rebuild the current state.

So Redis supports an interesting feature: it is able to rebuild the AOF in the background without interrupting service to clients. Whenever you issue a BGREWRITEAOF Redis will write the shortest sequence of commands needed to rebuild the current dataset in memory. If you're using the AOF with Redis 2.2 you'll need to run BGREWRITEAOF from time to time. Redis 2.4 is able to trigger log rewriting automatically (see the 2.4 example configuration file for more information).

How durable is the append only file?

You can configure how many times Redis will fsync data on disk. There are three options:

The suggested (and default) policy is to fsync every second. It is both very fast and pretty safe. The always policy is very slow in practice (although it was improved in Redis 2.0) – there is no way to make fsync faster than it is.

What should I do if my AOF gets corrupted?

It is possible that the server crashes while writing the AOF file (this still should never lead to inconsistencies), corrupting the file in a way that is no longer loadable by Redis. When this happens you can fix this problem using the following procedure:

How it works

Log rewriting uses the same copy-on-write trick already in use for snapshotting. This is how it works:

How I can switch to AOF, if I'm currently using dump.rdb snapshots?

There is a different procedure to do this in Redis 2.0 and Redis 2.2, as you can guess it's simpler in Redis 2.2 and does not require a restart at all.

Redis >= 2.2

The first CONFIG command enables the Append Only File. In order to do so Redis will block to generate the initial dump, then will open the file for writing, and will start appending all the next write queries.

The second CONFIG command is used to turn off snapshotting persistence. This is optional, if you wish you can take both the persistence methods enabled.

IMPORTANT: remember to edit your redis.conf to turn on the AOF, otherwise when you restart the server the configuration changes will be lost and the server will start again with the old configuration.

Redis 2.0

Interactions between AOF and RDB persistence

Redis >= 2.4 makes sure to avoid triggering an AOF rewrite when an RDB snapshotting operation is already in progress, or allowing a BGSAVE while the AOF rewrite is in progress. This prevents two Redis background processes from doing heavy disk I/O at the same time.

When snapshotting is in progress and the user explicitly requests a log rewrite operation using BGREWRITEAOF the server will reply with an OK status code telling the user the operation is scheduled, and the rewrite will start once the snapshotting is completed.

In the case both AOF and RDB persistence are enabled and Redis restarts the AOF file will be used to reconstruct the original dataset since it is guaranteed to be the most complete.

Backing up Redis data

Before starting this section, make sure to read the following sentence: Make Sure to Backup Your Database. Disks break, instances in the cloud disappear, and so forth: no backups means huge risk of data disappearing into /dev/null.

Redis is very data backup friendly since you can copy RDB files while the database is running: the RDB is never modified once produced, and while it gets produced it uses a temporary name and is renamed into its final destination atomically using rename(2) only when the new snapshot is complete.

This means that copying the RDB file is completely safe while the server is running. This is what we suggest:

Disaster recovery

Disaster recovery in the context of Redis is basically the same story as backups, plus the ability to transfer those backups in many different external data centers. This way data is secured even in the case of some catastrophic event affecting the main data center where Redis is running and producing its snapshots.

Since many Redis users are in the startup scene and thus don't have plenty of money to spend we'll review the most interesting disaster recovery techniques that don't have too high costs.

It is important to understand that this systems can easily fail if not coded in the right way. At least make absolutely sure that after the transfer is completed you are able to verify the file size (that should match the one of the file you copied) and possibly the SHA1 digest if you are using a VPS.

You also need some kind of independent alert system if the transfer of fresh backups is not working for some reason.