Dragonfly Blog
dragonflydb.io · Company blog · on HN since 2022
The Dragonfly company blog covers its Redis-compatible in-memory data store, with benchmarks, scaling features and licensing discussion.
What HN saysHN commenters recommend it as a faster Redis alternative under the BSL license and praise posts like Dragonfly Swarm, though some want more depth.
25HN people shared it
14linked it in comments
31stories submitted
198story points
2 years agolast shared
2022people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Dragonfly – The Fastest In-Memory Data Store6 people · 3 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 2Redis vs. Dragonfly Scalability and Performance4 people · 4 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 3Dragonfly Is Not Redis: An Open Letter to the Community2 people · 24 points · first shared 2025 · 1 comments on HN
- 4Dragonfly Swarm: Scaling In-Memory Data Without Limits2 people · 6 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 5Faq2 people · first shared 2023
- 6DragonFlydb: Cache Design1 people · 84 points · first shared 2022 · 26 comments on HN
- 7Dragonfly Search: a RediSearch-compatible command1 people · 14 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 8Dragonfly Is Production Ready (and we raised $21M)1 people · 9 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 9Dragonfly Achieves 6.43M Ops/SEC on AWS Graviton3E Instance1 people · 9 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 10No Free Tier for You1 people · 6 points · first shared 2024 · 2 comments on HN
- 11Introducing: Dragonfly Cloud1 people · 6 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 12New Kubernetes Operator for Dragonfly1 people · 6 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 13Ensuring Atomicity: A Tale of Dragonfly Transactions1 people · 5 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 14Infrastructure Should Be Boring1 people · 4 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 15Optimizing Dragonfly to 30x Throughput with BullMQ1 people · 3 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
jauntywundrkind · 2025-03-31
Great blog with a lot of good stuff. Loved their Scalable In Memory Dragonfly Swarm post, for example. https://www.dragonflydb.io/blog/announcing-dragonfly-swarm-scaling-in-…
I do wish they did more to show folks how to go deeper in integrating Dragonfly. A readme update 2 years ago talked about a native distributed log that would offer super fast option for integrators. That's the sort of super neat stuff that will entice geeks to come play: not just redis but faster, but having a deeper connection to the machine, to seeing what else is possible. https://github.com/dragonflydb/dragonfly/blame/main/README.md#L190
yla92 · 2025-01-02
Do checkout https://www.dragonflydb.io . It's also mentioned in the review!
NathanFlurry · 2024-03-21
Check out DragonflyDB (BSL): https://www.dragonflydb.io/
BSL is not OSI-approved, but it’s a much more reasonable AWS-resistant license. It’s the same license CockroachDB uses, for example.
KeyDB (BSL, acquired by Snapchat) is also an option: https://keydb.dev/
BSL is a much better license, but it’s a gamble on how long KeyDB will be supported. I don’t want to mess around with such a core part of my architecture.
colesantiago · 2023-05-21
There is also DragonflyDB which claims to be faster than both Redis and KeyDB.
https://www.dragonflydb.io/
avinassh · 2023-05-21
Their blog post goes into detail on how they are benchmarking and they use the benchmarking tool developed by Redis [1]
> We ran our tests on AWS Graviton2 EC2 instances, which are network-optimized and provide the best performance for web applications. We used memtier_benchmark — a widely used benchmarking tool developed by Redis Ltd. — to test throughput and latency, and Prometheus to monitor and visualize memory usage.
It is easy to reproduce and check the claims. Redis also countered with a blog post [2]
[1] - https://www.dragonflydb.io/blog/scaling-performance-redis-vs-dragonfly
[2] - https://redis.com/blog/redis-architecture-13-years-later/
throwaway888abc · 2022-05-30
Impressive. Will give it try for internal benchmarks.
Homepage:
https://dragonflydb.io/
Benchmark:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dragonflydb/dragonfly/main/doc/throu…
hp77 · 2025-03-16
Does Redis support multithreading? Doesn't it use a single-threaded event loop, while DragonflyDB basic version is with multithreading enabled and shared-nothing architecture. Also I found this latest comparison between Valkey and DragonflyDB : https://www.dragonflydb.io/blog/dragonfly-vs-valkey-benchmark-on-googl…
OPoncz · 2024-11-22
Its available on Dragonfly https://github.com/dragonflydb/dragonfly
Here is the docs https://www.dragonflydb.io/docs/command-reference/hashes/hexpire
Rochus · 2024-06-15
Well, if you intend to contribute to a game engine written in C++, it is of course of advantage if you can program in C++. But there are also game engines written in Go and other garbage collected languages (see e.g. https://www.dragonflydb.io/game-dev/engines/golang). There are also games written in Go. By the end of the day it's mostly a question of preference. As of Figma, as far as I understand it runs as Wasm; so essentially it can be written in any language which can compile to Wasm (which includes Go).
Veen · 2023-05-21
> I imagine with GPT this is very easy to generate now
That's exactly what they are doing, but if they had any brains, they'd have a human read the answers before they publish:
https://www.dragonflydb.io/faq/is-memcached-good
> As an AI language model, I am unable to make subjective judgments on whether Memcached is "good" or not. However, I can provide information about the features, benefits, and limitations of Memcached.
spacechild1 · 2023-05-21
Strange, your link to the FAQ gives me a 404, but existing links to specific FAQ sections, posted in the comments below, still work. On the website I can only find this: https://www.dragonflydb.io/docs/about/faq. Maybe they took down the original FAQ?
chocolatkey · 2023-05-21
I apologize for the somewhat off-topic nature off this comment, but it really irritates me when I see the website for a product with competition, go to their sitemap, and see this blatant SEO gaming. For example, I went to their FAQ (https://www.dragonflydb.io/faq) expecting things about their database, instead I get a bunch of copycat answers to weird questions intended to drive traffic to their site when people ask questions about other databases. I see many application sites doing this nowadays, and it makes me not want to use them. I imagine with GPT this is very easy to generate now
O__________O · 2023-03-21
TLDR: Dragonfly throughput is 25X faster than Redis for both GET and SET operations.
https://dragonflydb.io/blog/scaling-performance-redis-vs-dragonfly
mjevans · 2024-09-10
Partitioning has been supported for quite a while
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/ddl-partitioning.html
Logical replication...
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/logical-replication.html
https://github.com/2ndQuadrant/pglogical?tab=readme-ov-file#pglogical-…
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/dms/latest/sbs/chap-manageddatabases.postg…
In 'recent years' (in database support terms), PostgreSQL has gained autovacuum support.
https://www.enterprisedb.com/blog/postgresql-vacuum-and-analyze-best-p…
This stack overflow question was insightful, in that most of the slowness many experience may be related to foreign key check lookups on unindexed columns that point to external keys. https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/328884/why-is-the-delete-opera… Partitioned data and batches to spread out updates also appear to be current best practices https://www.dragonflydb.io/faq/postgres-delete-performance