I'm trying to analyise the db size for redis db and tweak the storage of our data per a few articles such as https://davidcel.is/posts/the-story-of-my-redis-database/ and https://engineering.instagram.com/storing-hundreds-of-millions-of-simple-key-value-pairs-in-redis-1091ae80f74c
I've read documentation about "key sizes" (i.e. https://redis.io/commands/object)
and tried running various tools like:
redis-cli --bigkeys
and also tried to read the output from the redis-cli:
INFO memory
The size semantics are not clear to me.
Does the reported size reflect ONLY the size for the key itself, i.e. if my key is "abc" and the value is "value1" the reported size is for the "abc" portion? Also the same question in respects to complex data structures for that key such as a hash / array or list.
Trial and error doesn't seem to give me a clear result.
Different tools give different answers.
First read about --bigkeys - it reports big value sizes in the keyspace, excluding the space taken by the key's name. Note that in this case the size of the value means something different for each data type, i.e. Strings are sized by their STRLEN (bytes) whereas all other by the number of their nested elements.
So that basically means that it gives little indication about actual usage, but rather does as it is intended - finds big keys (not big key names, only estimated big values).
INFO MEMORY is a different story. The used_memory is reported in bytes and reflects the entire RAM consumption of key names, their values and all associated overheads of the internal data structures.
There also DEBUG OBJECT but note that it's output is not a reliable way to measure the memory consumption of a key in Redis - the serializedlength field is given in bytes needed for persisting the object, not the actual footprint in memory that includes various administrative overheads on top of the data itself.
Lastly, as of v4 we have the MEMORY USAGE command that does a much better job - see https://github.com/antirez/redis-doc/pull/851 for the details.