valkey-ARM - Man Page

ARM support

Description

Valkey supports the ARM processor, for example the Raspberry Pi, as a main platform. While Valkey does run on Android, in the future we look forward to extend our testing efforts to Android to also make it an officially supported platform.

We believe that Valkey is ideal for IoT and embedded devices for several reasons:

Valkey /proc/cpu/alignment requirements

Linux on ARM allows to trap unaligned accesses and fix them inside the kernel in order to continue the execution of the offending program instead of generating a SIGBUS. Valkey avoids any kind of unaligned access, so there is no need to have a specific value for this kernel configuration. Even when kernel alignment fixing set as disabled Valkey should run as expected.

Building Valkey in the Pi

  • Download Valkey.
  • Use make as usual to create the executable.

There is nothing special in the process. The only difference is that by default, Valkey uses the libc allocator instead of defaulting to jemalloc as it does in other Linux based environments. This is because we believe that for the small use cases inside embedded devices, memory fragmentation is unlikely to be a problem. Moreover jemalloc on ARM may not be as tested as the libc allocator.

Performance

Performance testing of Valkey was performed on the Raspberry Pi 3 and Pi 1 model B. The difference between the two Pis in terms of delivered performance is quite big. The benchmarks were performed via the loopback interface, since most use cases will probably use Valkey from within the device and not via the network. The following numbers were obtained using Redis OSS 4.0.

Raspberry Pi 3:

  • Test 1 : 5 millions writes with 1 million keys (even distribution among keys). No persistence, no pipelining. 28,000 ops/sec.
  • Test 2: Like test 1 but with pipelining using groups of 8 operations: 80,000 ops/sec.
  • Test 3: Like test 1 but with AOF enabled, fsync 1 sec: 23,000 ops/sec
  • Test 4: Like test 3, but with an AOF rewrite in progress: 21,000 ops/sec

Raspberry Pi 1 model B:

  • Test 1 : 5 millions writes with 1 million keys (even distribution among keys). No persistence, no pipelining. 2,200 ops/sec.
  • Test 2: Like test 1 but with pipelining using groups of 8 operations: 8,500 ops/sec.
  • Test 3: Like test 1 but with AOF enabled, fsync 1 sec: 1,820 ops/sec
  • Test 4: Like test 3, but with an AOF rewrite in progress: 1,000 ops/sec

The benchmarks above are referring to simple SET/GET operations. The performance is similar for all the Valkey fast operations (not running in linear time). However sorted sets may show slightly slower numbers.

Info

2024-09-23 8.0.0 Valkey Manual