Speed and scalability are significant issues today, at least in the application landscape. Among the critical enablers for fast data access implementation within in-memory data stores are the game changers in recent times, which are technologies like Redis and Memcached. However, the question arises of choosing the best one. This article takes a plunge into the comparative analysis of these two cult technologies, highlights the critical performance metrics concerning scalability considerations, and, through real-world use cases, gives you the clarity to confidently make an informed decision.
We have run these benchmarks on the AWS EC2 instances and designed a custom dataset to make it as close as possible to real application use cases. We compare throughput, operations per second, and latency under different loads, namely the P90 and P99 percentiles. We investigate deeper in a clustered environment and try identifying the scalability characteristics of both Redis and Memcached, including the implementation and management complexities of either. This level of comparison detail will assist decision-makers with the information they would need to make a more appropriate choice of an in-memory data store for their needs.