The first method of reducing memory use in Redis is simple: use short structures. For LISTs, SETs, HASHes, and ZSETs, Redis offers a group of configuration options that allows for Redis to store short structures in a more space-efficient manner. In this section, we’ll discuss those configuration options, show how to verify that we’re getting those optimizations, and discuss some drawbacks to using short structures.
When using short LISTs, HASHes, and ZSETs, Redis can optionally store them using a more compact storage method known as a ziplist. A ziplist is an unstructured representation of one of the three types of objects. Rather than storing the doubly linked list, the hash table, or the hash table plus the skiplist as would normally be the case for each of these structures, Redis stores a serialized version of the data, which must be decoded for every read, partially re-encoded for every write, and may require moving data around in memory.
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