Hotkeys Detection Arrives in Redis

A major new feature lands in Redis with hotkeys detection, allowing developers to identify which keys are consuming the most CPU time and network bandwidth. The implementation by minchopaskal and team introduces a sophisticated probabilistic tracking system with minimal performance overhead.

Duration: PT3M43S

Episode overview

This episode is a short developer briefing from Redis.

It explains recent repository work in plain language.

  • Show: Redis
  • Published: 2026-01-17T11:34:08Z
  • Audio duration: PT3M43S

Transcript excerpt

This excerpt keeps the crawler page concise. Listen to the episode or use the RSS feed for the full update.

Hey there, Redis enthusiasts! Welcome back to another episode of the Redis podcast. I'm your host, and wow, do we have an exciting update to dive into today - January 17th, 2026.

You know that feeling when you're running a Redis instance in production and you just know there are some keys that are absolutely hammering your server, but you can't quite put your finger on which ones? Well, my friends, that problem just got a whole lot easier to solve.

Let's talk about the star of today's show - a massive pull request from minchopaskal that just merged, bringing us hotkeys detection. And when I say massive, I mean it - we're talking about over 2,400 lines of new code across 14 files. This isn't just a small feature addition; this is a game-changer for Redis…

So what exactly are hotkeys in this context? Think of them as the keys that are hogging your resources. The new system tracks two crucial metrics: how much CPU time a key is consuming and how much network bandwidth it's eating up. It's like having a performance profiler specifically for your Redis keys.

Here's what I love about this implementation - it's smart. Really smart. Instead of just brute-force tracking everything, which…

The…

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