The open-source Valkey key-value database that is forked from Redis is preparing for the big Valkey 9.0 feature release. Valkey 9.0-rc1 was issued today and comes with some exciting performance optimizations and other enhancements for this in-memory KV database.

One of the optimizations in Valkey 9.0 is this merge optimizing the BITCOUNT command using AVX2. With this SIMD AVX2 optimization for a 1MB value size it's as much as a +514% change while for smaller 4KB value sizes is arorund a 10% improvement or +116% at 64KB.

Valkey also added optimized string-to-integer performance and there it's relying on AVX-512 instructions. With that AVX-512 usage for string-to-integer conversions it's seeing a 17~19% performance boost.

Valkey 9.0-rc1 also brings better replication stability, support for using ARM NEON SIMD for optimized BITCOUNT, SSE2 SIMD for faster "findBucket" performance up to 6%, and a variety of other performance optimizations.

Some of the new features coming for Valkey 9.0 include multi-database support for the cluster mode, Multi-Patch TCP (MPTCP) support, atomic slot migration, and more.

Downloads and more details on the Valkey 9.0-rc1 release via GitHub .