Redis in Action

IN ACTION Josiah L. Carlson FOREWORD BY Salvatore Sanfilippo MANNING Redis in Action Redis in Action JOSIAH L. CARLSON MANNING Shelter Island For online information and ordering of this and other Manning books, please visit www.manning.com. The publisher offers discounts on this book when ordered in quantity. For more information, please contact Special Sales Department Manning Publications Co. 20 Baldwin Road PO Box 261 Shelter Island, NY 11964 Email: [email protected] ©2013 by Manning Publications Co. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the publisher. Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. 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Development editor: Elizabeth Lexleigh 20 Baldwin Road Technical proofreaders: James Philips, Kevin Chang, PO Box 261 and Nicholas Lindgren Shelter Island, NY 11964 Java translator: Eric Van Dewoestine Copyeditor: Benjamin Berg Proofreader: Katie Tennant Typesetter: Gordan Salinovic Cover designer: Marija Tudor ISBN 9781935182054 Printed in the United States of America 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 – MAL – 18 17 16 15 14 13 To my dear wife, See Luan, and to our baby girl, Mikela brief contents PART 1 GETTING STARTED . ..........................................................1 1 ■ Getting to know Redis 3 2 ■ Anatomy of a Redis web application 24 PART 2 CORE CONCEPTS.............................................................37 3 ■ Commands in Redis 39 4 ■ Keeping data safe and ensuring performance 63 5 ■ Using Redis for application support 90 6 ■ Application components in Redis 110 7 ■ Search-based applications 154 8 ■ Building a simple social network 185 PART 3 NEXT STEPS.................................................................207 9 ■ Reducing memory use 209 10 ■ Scaling Redis 228 11 ■ Scripting Redis with Lua 249 vii contents foreword xv preface xvii acknowledgments xix about this book xxi about the cover illustration xxv PART 1 GETTING STARTED ..................................................1 Getting to know Redis 3 1 1.1 What is Redis? 4 Redis compared to other databases and software 4 ■ Other features 6 ■ Why Redis? 6 1.2 What Redis data structures look like 7 Strings in Redis 9 ■ Lists in Redis 10 ■ Sets in Redis 11 Hashes in Redis 12 ■ Sorted sets in Redis 13 1.3 Hello Redis 15 Voting on articles 15 ■ Posting and fetching articles 19 Grouping articles 20 1.4 Getting help 22 1.5 Summary 22 ix x CONTENTS Anatomy of a Redis web application 24 2 2.1 Login and cookie caching 25 2.2 Shopping carts in Redis 29 2.3 Web page caching 30 2.4 Database row caching 31 2.5 Web page analytics 34 2.6 Summary 36 PART 2 CORE CONCEPTS ...................................................37 Commands in Redis 39 3 3.1 Strings 40 3.2 Lists 43 3.3 Sets 46 3.4 Hashes 48 3.5 Sorted sets 50 3.6 Publish/subscribe 54 3.7 Other commands 57 Sorting 57 ■ Basic Redis transactions 58 ■ Expiring keys 61 3.8 Summary 62 Keeping data safe and ensuring performance 63 4 4.1 Persistence options 64 Persisting to disk with snapshots 65 ■ Append-only file persistence 68 ■ Rewriting/compacting append-only files 70 4.2 Replication 70 Configuring Redis for replication 71 ■ Redis replication startup process 72 ■ Master/slave chains 73 ■ Verifying disk writes 74 4.3 Handling system failures 75 Verifying snapshots and append-only files 76 ■ Replacing a failed master 77 4.4 Redis transactions 78 Defining users and their inventory 79 ■ Listing items in the marketplace 80 ■ Purchasing items 82 4.5 Non-transactional pipelines 84 CONTENTS xi 4.6 Performance considerations 87 4.7 Summary 89 Using Redis for application support 90 5 5.1 Logging to Redis 91 Recent logs 91 ■ Common logs 92 5.2 Counters and statistics 93 Storing counters in Redis 94 ■ Storing statistics in Redis 98 Simplifying our statistics recording and discovery 100 5.3 IP-to-city and -country lookup 102 Loading the location tables 102 ■ Looking up cities 104 5.4 Service discovery and configuration 104 Using Redis to store configuration information 105 ■ One Redis server per application component 106 ■ Automatic Redis connection management 107 5.5 Summary 109 Application components in Redis 110 6 6.1 Autocomplete 111 Autocomplete for recent contacts 111 ■ Address book autocomplete 113 6.2 Distributed locking 116 Why locks are important 117 ■ Simple locks 119 ■ Building a lock in Redis 120 ■ Fine-grained locking 123 ■ Locks with timeouts 126 6.3 Counting semaphores 127 Building a basic counting semaphore 127 ■ Fair semaphores 129 Refreshing semaphores 132 ■ Preventing race conditions 132 6.4 Task queues 134 First-in, first-out queues 134 ■ Delayed tasks 137 6.5 Pull messaging 140 Single-recipient publish/subscribe replacement 140 ■ Multiple-recipient publish/subscribe replacement 141 6.6 Distributing files with Redis 146 Aggregating users by location 146 ■ Sending files 148 Receiving files 149 ■ Processing files 150 6.7 Summary 152 xii CONTENTS Search-based applications 154 7 7.1 Searching in Redis 155 Basic search theory 155 ■ Sorting search results 161 7.2 Sorted indexes 163 Sorting search results with ZSETs 163 ■ Non-numeric sorting with ZSETs 165 7.3 Ad targeting 167 What’s an ad server? 168 ■ Indexing ads 168 ■ Targeting ads 171 Learning from user behavior 175 7.4 Job search 181 Approaching the problem one job at a time 181 ■ Approaching the problem like search 182 7.5 Summary 183 Building a simple social network 185 8 8.1 Users and statuses 186 User information 186 ■ Status messages 187 8.2 Home timeline 188 8.3 Followers/following lists 190 8.4 Posting or deleting a status update 192 8.5 Streaming API 196 Data to be streamed 196 ■ Serving the data 197 ■ Filtering streamed messages 200 8.6 Summary 206 PART 3 NEXT STEPS .......................................................207 Reducing memory use 209 9 9.1 Short structures 210 The ziplist representation 210 ■ The intset encoding for SETs 212 ■ Performance issues for long ziplists and intsets 213 9.2 Sharded structures 215 HASHes 216 ■ SETs 219 9.3 Packing bits and bytes 222 What location information should we store? 222 ■ Storing packed data 224 ■ Calculating aggregates over sharded STRINGs 225 9.4 Summary 227 CONTENTS xiii Scaling Redis 228 10 10.1 Scaling reads 228 10.2 Scaling writes and memory capacity 232 Handling shard configuration 233 ■ Creating a server-sharded connection decorator 234 10.3 Scaling complex queries 236 Scaling search query volume 236 ■ Scaling search index size 236 Scaling a social network 241 10.4 Summary 248 Scripting Redis with Lua 249 11 11.1 Adding functionality without writing C 250 Loading Lua scripts into Redis 250 ■ Creating a new status message 252 11.2 Rewriting locks and semaphores with Lua 255 Why locks in Lua? 255 ■ Rewriting our lock 256 Counting semaphores in Lua 258 11.3 Doing away with WATCH/MULTI/EXEC 260 Revisiting group autocomplete 260 ■ Improving the marketplace, again 262 11.4 Sharding LISTs with Lua 265 Structuring a sharded LIST 265 ■ Pushing items onto the sharded LIST 266 ■ Popping items from the sharded LIST 268 Performing blocking pops from the sharded LIST 269 11.5 Summary 271 appendix A Quick and dirty setup 273 appendix B Other resources and references 281 index 284 foreword Redis was created about three years ago for practical reasons: basically, I was trying to do the impossible with an on-disk SQL database. I was handling a large write-heavy load with the only hardware I was able to afford—a little virtualized instance. My problem was conceptually simple: my server was receiving a stream of page views from multiple websites using a small JavaScript tracker. I needed to store the lat- est n page views for every site and show them in real time to users connected to a web interface, while maintaining a small history. With a peak load of a few thousand page views per second, whatever my database schema was, and whatever trade-offs I was willing to pick, there was no way for my SQL store to handle the load with such poor hardware. My inability to upgrade the hardware for cost concerns coupled with the feeling that to handle a capped list of values shouldn’t have been so hard, after all, gave me the idea of creating a throw-away prototype of an in-memory data store that could handle lists as a native data type, with constant-time pop and push operations on both sides of the lists. To make a long story short, the concept worked, I rewrote the first prototype using the C language, added a fork-based persistence feature, and Redis was born. Fast-forward to the present. After three years, the project has evolved in significant ways. We have a more robust system now, and with Redis 2.6 just released and the major work in progress being cluster and HA features, Redis is entering its maturity period. One of the most remarkable advancements in the Redis ecosystem, in my opinion, is its community of users and contributors, from the redis.io website to the Redis Google Group.

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