It's been just over one year since the Linux Foundation and partners announced Valkey as a fork of Redis . Following the release of Redis 8.0 in September for this in-memory key-value database, Valkey 8.1 is out today.

Valkey 8.1 was just released as a minor upgrade to this Redis fork. There are performance improvements, better reliability, and usability enhancements over Valkey 8.0.

One of the new performance enhancements of Valkey 8.1 is optimizing the performance of the bitcount command by using x86 SIMD instructions. At this stage it's about speeding-up bitcount using Advanced Vector Extensions 2 (AVX2).

The pull request adding the AVX2-optimized bitcount command shows somce nice speed-ups with larger values:

There are also other performance improvements in Valkey 8.1 like using a new memory efficient hash table to store keys, TLS with I/O threads, and other optimizations.

Downloads and more details on the Valkey 8.1 GA release via GitHub .