Hi all,

So I have been working on this project KiviDB from February 2026. It started as a project for me to understand rust, having a product with no GC pauses, memory blow up after snapshots and getting OOM on running pods, and that was actually an issue I faced with Dragonfly. I wanted to have something picking the best of Rust, but also picking the best parts of other alternatives like Garnet and Dragonfly. I used AI a lot, but I was the one making the design decisions based on the tests that claude picked from my history of troubleshooting sessions as part of my job. KiviDB supports both RESP2 and RESP3 protocol. I had some founders credits on my AWS account which helped me with the infra, and running instances I could perform benchmark on.

Its keyspace is sharded across threads, it is multi-threaded in nature, and performs best on Linux due to io_uring, I used the tokio_uring crate for this. It also has tokio fallback for other OS's. I hadn't open sourced it until recently as I felt it was not ready yet, the best way to learn it was to build a cloud managed service for it across all three widely used cloud providers i.e AWS, GCP and azure. Since I used to mainly work with cloud, I had some insights on what would be the best ways for the deployments, how to conduct failovers, manage SLAs, etc. And that's what I took help from claude to fast pace it. The website does look like AI slop but it works for now, given my limited resources, that's all I had. You may check it out at : https://kividb.io, I open sourced the core engine under AGPLv3, didn't want to have just source available, because that is available with other tools too. It supports apprx 98-99% of the redis 8.10 commands, few have issues and you can find them at https://github.com/kividbio/kividb/issues, contributors are welcome.

Now the numbers, for the final benchmark, I used 2 c7gn.metal servers, in the same placement group in us-east1, and I used memtier-benchmark tool for this. The setting was : 10M keys, 100B each, 32 cores in use with both pipeline and un-pipelined runs.

pipeline 16 GET: KiviDB 21.2M ops/sec vs Dragonfly 2.0 9.1M, Redis 8.10 2.4M, Redis Cluster 32 shards 4.7M

When not pipelined, Dragonfly performed slightly better at 3.35M ops/sec vs kividb at 3.07M ops/sec. Memory per key was also slightly worse than dragonfly and almost same as Redis, 177B (kividb) vs 134B (dragonfly) vs 178B (redis).

With vector ingestion times it was slower but when querying, it was faster than most alternatives at lower ef, however slower than dragonfly at high ef. Most of the technical details are mentioned here so you can check it out: https://kividb.io/benchmarks.

easiest way to try it: docker run -d -p 6380:6380 kividb/kividb

I am looking forward to building a community around this, provide better rust based tools, I am open to constructive criticism and value informed opinion. Thanks

Show HN: KiviDB, a faster Redis-compatible memory database and vector cache