by Paul Smith (@paulsmith)
How does the Redis server work?
I was curious to learn more about Redis’s internals, so I’ve been familiarizing myself with the source, largely by reading and jumping around in Emacs. After I had peeled back enough of the onion’s layers, I realized I was trying to keep track of too many details in my head, and it wasn’t clear how it all hung together. I decided to write out in narrative form how an instance of the Redis server starts up and initializes itself, and how it handles the request/response cycle with a client, as a way of explaining it to myself, hopefully in a clear fashion. Luckily, Redis has a nice, clean code base that is easy to read and follow along. Armed with a TAGS file, my $EDITOR, and GDB, I set out to see how it all works under the hood. (Incidentally, I was working with the Redis code base as of commit b4f2e41. Of course, internals such as I outline below are subject to change. However, the broad architecture of the server is unlikely to change very much, and I tried to keep that in mind as I went along.)