#99th of 102 in Backends, databases and hosting
dragonfly
Multi-threaded in-memory data store compatible with Redis and Memcached APIs
- Stars
- 31.9k
- License
- custom license
- Last commit
- Nov 2026
- Last release
- Nov 2026
- Language
- C++
30,167 on 21 Apr 202631,875 on 10 Nov 2026
From GitHub's daily star counts.
Checked on GitHub.
Overview
Dragonfly is an in-memory data store written in C++ that speaks the Redis and Memcached protocols, so existing clients work without code changes. It uses a shared-nothing, multi-threaded design with VLL-based transactions and a Dash-derived hashtable, plus fork-less snapshotting. About 185 Redis commands (roughly the Redis 5.0 API) and 13 Memcached commands are implemented.
Who it is for: Teams running Redis or Memcached who want more throughput on multi-core servers
Strengths
- Scales across CPU cores; README reports 3.8M QPS on c6gn.16xlarge versus a single Redis process
- Fork-less snapshotting; README shows no visible memory growth during bgsave
- Works with Redis clients; optional Memcached API via --memcached_port
- HTTP console and Prometheus metrics served on the main port (6379)
Weaknesses
- Command coverage is about 185 commands, roughly the Redis 5.0 API
- Key expiry capped at 2^28-1 seconds; expiration behavior differs from Redis in places
- HTTP console is on by default; disable it if the port is exposed
- Benchmarks are vendor-run on AWS; README gives no independent results
What it needs
- no GPU
- port 6379
Quick answers
Is dragonfly open source?
Its code is public on GitHub under its own license terms; read them before you use it at work.
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