Lower your Redis memory footprint by a few lines of code

If you have Redis as your cache for your application you might want to lower your memory footprint by compressing your data. This will save you at least 50% of your memory usage for your Redis which will save you money.

The code sample is for node.js but the concept work for any language.

const zlib = require('zlib');
const redis = require('redis');
const Promise = require('bluebird');

Promise.promisifyAll(redis.RedisClient.prototype);
Promise.promisifyAll(redis.Multi.prototype);

function set(key, value, expiration) {
  const expire = expiration || config.redis.expirationInSeconds;
  return zipAsync(Buffer.from(value)).then((compressed) => {
    return compressed.toString('base64');
  }).then((compressed) => {
    return redisClient.setexAsync(key, expire, compressed);
  })
}

function get(key) {
  return redisClient.getAsync(key).then((cachedResponse) => {
    if (!cachedResponse) {
      return null;
    }
    return gunzipAsync(Buffer.from(cachedResponse, 'base64')).catch(() => {
      // Just in case if any cache is not compressed
      return cachedResponse;
    });
  }).then(response => {
    return response ? response.toString() : response;
  });
}

You don’t need to use Bluebird if you don’t want to.

Now the problem is I can’t just go in to my Redis and Get ${key} I want because it won’t be readable. You can just do this.

redis-cli -h 127.0.0.1 GET "${YOUR_KEY}" | base64 -D | gzip -d | jq

I use jq because I JSON.stringify my value

We lower our cache node from 16GB to just 3GB.