When Every Bit Counts: How Valkey Rebuilt Its Hashtable for Modern Hardware

Abstract

Ever wondered what happens when a bunch of performance-obsessed developers decide their blazing-fast database isn't quite blazing-fast enough? Join me for a deep-dive into how we threw out the beating heart of Valkey, a hashtable that was designed over 15 years ago, and replace it with something faster and more memory efficient. We'll dive into how careful attention to cache-line alignment, memory access patterns, and SIMD operations led to significant improvements in both memory efficiency and performance. Whether you're working on high-performance systems or just curious about modern hardware optimization, you'll come away with concrete insights into how subtle architectural choices can have outsized impacts on real-world performance.


From the same track

Session

The High Performance Talk You Did Not Expect To Hear about Rust

Abstract: Rust makes things faster but it slows down engineers, right? This was our team’s assumption when we decided to rewrite our code from Kotlin into Rust. But, we were wrong in completely unexpected ways.