Valkey 9.1 was announced as generally available on June 13 at Open Source Summit North America in Minneapolis by project maintainer Madelyn Olson, an AWS Principal Engineer [1]. The release delivers 2.1 million requests per second on 512-byte payloads, showcasing significant throughput improvements [2].
The update includes a new I/O threading model, faster streaming operations, higher throughput on GET commands, and quicker sorted set queries, along with default activation of hardware clock support and other optimizations [2]. Memory usage has been lowered during various operations, and rehashing performance has improved, contributing to better overall efficiency [2].
Security enhancements include a new numbered database-level access control (ACL) system that supports fine-grained multi-tenant isolation within single instances, improved TLS integration, and automated TLS certificate reloading. Valkey also moved Lua scripting engine support into a separate module for modularity and security purposes [2, 1].
New commands introduced in Valkey 9.1 include HGETDEL, which atomically retrieves and deletes fields from a hash; MSETEX for setting multiple keys with a shared expiration; and CLUSTERSCAN for scanning keys cluster-wide [2]. The release claims up to 10% reduction in per-key memory usage for common workloads without requiring tuning or reconfiguration [1].
Olson said, “Our goal as a project is to ensure that Valkey delivers new functionality while behaving very predictably. Specifically, we want to sustain our best-in-class performance and efficiency. We’re able to consistently achieve this by continually investing in the modularity of the engine, which enables new functionality like full-text search.” [1]
Valkey is an open-source fork of the Redis key-value program developed by a broad community of leading tech providers [1]. Alongside version 9.1, new releases of Valkey Admin, Valkey Search, and the Valkey GLIDE client also launched [1].
