redis in Node.js app environment

Question

I am building an app with several Node.js instances as a Backend (http server, socket server and several a pool of domain servers). Now I am trying to cover several communication and configuration aspects and am wondering if redis makes an appropriate solution.

So, I would use it for the following purposes:

• Implementation of a shared run-time lookup table. It's a table of several hundreds of relativelly simple records, accessed and manipulated by 2 node-instances.
• Implementation of message queues. Each domain server receives commands from the http server and should execute them sequentially. Domain server should be able to listen on a redis-event, and execute each new command upon its arival socket sever also has a regis message queue and listen to its event, in order to push notification to connected clients

Is redis "too heavy" for such a purpose?

Does it offer all needed functionality?

I can definitelly implement a look-up in a file and/or memory and a queue using sockets. However, it might make a code cleaner and a solution more robust with redis.

Answer 1

Redis is definitely not a heavy solution, on the contrary. It's small, insanely fast (when using pipelining), easy to deploy. I consider it as a light solution, a kind of swiss knife that may solves many problems.

Redis based message queues are OK if you don't expect any guarantee on the message delivery. That is to say Redis based queues can't assure you the client has received the message. If it's a problem for your application you should consider using an heavier solution, like 0mq or Rabbitmq.