290k Requests per Second on One Node, and Faster Than Valkey
· 11 min read
This week Kahuna crossed a line I did not expect to cross this year. A single node served 290k get requests per second for ephemeral keys. On the same machine, with the same number of clients, Valkey 9.1 served 247k plain GET requests per second.
The rate limiter is the number I care about more. Kahuna ran the fixed-window counter script from the rate-limiting recipe at about 200k requests per second. Valkey ran the same counter as a Lua script at 161k with EVAL and 175k with EVALSHA.
Before this work the same rate limiter ran at 84k. Nothing about the storage engine changed. What changed is how requests travel over the wire, and how a script that touches one key runs inside the node.