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

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.