Lux

A drop-in Redis replacement. 3-5x faster.
Multi-threaded. Written in Rust. MIT licensed forever.

Lux Cloud · Benchmarks · Architecture

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Why Lux?

Redis is single-threaded by design. Every command runs on one core. Lux takes the opposite approach: a sharded concurrent architecture built in Rust that safely uses all your cores. Change your connection string. Everything else stays the same.

Works with every Redis client -- ioredis, redis-py, go-redis, Jedis, redis-rb. Zero code changes.

Benchmarks

redis-benchmark, 50 clients, 1M requests per test. All competitors on the same machine.

Pipeline	Lux	Redis 7	Valkey 9	KeyDB	Lux vs Redis
1	106K	110K	108K	68K	0.97x
16	1.49M	902K	745K	930K	1.65x
64	4.65M	1.50M	1.16M	1.41M	3.10x
128	7.19M	1.73M	1.30M	1.46M	4.16x
256	10.5M	1.88M	1.41M	1.35M	5.59x

At pipeline depth 256, Lux hits 10.5 million SET ops/sec. That's 5.6x faster than Redis. The gap grows with core count and pipeline depth because Lux's shard batching and multi-threading scale with concurrency while Redis hits a single-core ceiling.

Lux Cloud

Don't want to manage infrastructure? Lux Cloud is managed Lux hosting.

• $5/mo per instance, 1GB memory
• 4x more memory than Redis Cloud at the same price
• Deploy in seconds, connect with any Redis client
• Persistence, monitoring, and web console included

Features

• 80+ Redis commands -- strings, lists, hashes, sets, pub/sub
• RESP protocol -- drop-in compatible with every Redis client
• Multi-threaded -- auto-tuned shards, parking_lot RwLocks, tokio async runtime
• Zero-copy parser -- RESP arguments are byte slices into the read buffer
• Pipeline batching -- commands grouped by shard, one lock acquisition per batch
• Persistence -- automatic snapshots, configurable interval
• Auth -- password authentication via LUX_PASSWORD
• Pub/Sub -- SUBSCRIBE, UNSUBSCRIBE, PUBLISH
• TTL support -- EX, PX, EXPIRE, PEXPIRE, PERSIST, TTL, PTTL
• 856KB Docker image -- the entire database fits in under 1MB. Redis is 30MB. Dragonfly is 180MB.
• MIT licensed -- no license rug-pulls, unlike Redis (RSALv2/SSPL)

Quick Start

cargo build --release
./target/release/lux

Lux starts on 0.0.0.0:6379 by default. Connect with any Redis client:

redis-cli
> SET hello world
OK
> GET hello
"world"

Docker

docker run -d -p 6379:6379 ghcr.io/lux-db/lux:latest

Environment Variables

Variable	Default	Description
LUX_PORT	6379	TCP port
LUX_PASSWORD	(none)	Enable AUTH
LUX_DATA_DIR	.	Snapshot directory
LUX_SAVE_INTERVAL	60	Snapshot interval in seconds (0 to disable)
LUX_SHARDS	auto	Shard count (default: num_cpus * 16)
LUX_RESTRICTED	(none)	Set to 1 to disable KEYS, FLUSHALL, FLUSHDB

Node.js (ioredis)

npm install ioredis

import Redis from "ioredis"

const redis = new Redis("redis://localhost:6379")
await redis.set("hello", "world")
console.log(await redis.get("hello")) // "world"

Python (redis-py)

pip install redis

import redis

r = redis.Redis(host="localhost", port=6379)
r.set("hello", "world")
print(r.get("hello"))  # b"world"

Go (go-redis)

import "github.com/redis/go-redis/v9"

rdb := redis.NewClient(&redis.Options{Addr: "localhost:6379"})
rdb.Set(ctx, "hello", "world", 0)

Supported Commands

Strings: SET GET SETNX SETEX PSETEX GETSET MGET MSET STRLEN APPEND INCR DECR INCRBY DECRBY

Keys: DEL EXISTS KEYS SCAN TYPE RENAME TTL PTTL EXPIRE PEXPIRE PERSIST DBSIZE FLUSHDB FLUSHALL

Lists: LPUSH RPUSH LPOP RPOP LLEN LRANGE LINDEX

Hashes: HSET HMSET HGET HMGET HDEL HGETALL HKEYS HVALS HLEN HEXISTS HINCRBY

Sets: SADD SREM SMEMBERS SISMEMBER SCARD SUNION SINTER SDIFF

Pub/Sub: PUBLISH SUBSCRIBE UNSUBSCRIBE

Server: PING ECHO INFO SAVE BGSAVE LASTSAVE AUTH CONFIG CLIENT SELECT COMMAND DUMP RESTORE

Architecture

Client connections (tokio tasks)
        |
   Zero-Copy RESP Parser (byte slices, no allocations)
        |
   Pipeline Batching (group by shard, sort, batch execute)
        |
   Command Dispatch (byte-level matching, no string conversion)
        |
   Sharded Store (auto-tuned RwLock shards, hashbrown raw_entry)
        |
   FNV Hash -> Shard Selection (pre-computed, reused for HashMap lookup)

Read the full deep dive at luxdb.dev/architecture.

License

MIT