Redis 3.0 release notes

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Upgrade urgency levels:

LOW: No need to upgrade unless there are new features you want to use. MODERATE: Program an upgrade of the server, but it’s not urgent. HIGH: There is a critical bug that may affect a subset of users. Upgrade! CRITICAL: There is a critical bug affecting MOST USERS. Upgrade ASAP.

–[ Redis 3.0.0 ] Release date: 1 Apr 2015

What’s new in Redis 3.0 compared to Redis 2.8?

• Redis Cluster: a distributed implementation of a subset of Redis.
• New “embedded string” object encoding resulting in less cache misses. Big speed gain under certain work loads.
• AOF child -> parent final data transmission to minimize latency due to “last write” during AOF rewrites.
• Much improved LRU approximation algorithm for keys eviction.
• WAIT command to block waiting for a write to be transmitted to the specified number of slaves.
• MIGRATE connection caching. Much faster keys migraitons.
• MIGARTE new options COPY and REPLACE.
• CLIENT PAUSE command: stop processing client requests for a specified amount of time.
• BITCOUNT performance improvements.
• CONFIG SET accepts memory values in different units (for example you can use “CONFIG SET maxmemory 1gb”).
• Redis log format slightly changed reporting in each line the role of the instance (master/slave) or if it’s a saving child log.
• INCR performance improvements.

Refactoring changes (no new features nor bug fixes)

• Blocking operations full refactoring (blocked.c)
• Client output buffer memory tracking refactored.

Changes between RC6 and 3.0.0 stable:

General changes

• Fixes to diskless replication. (Oran Agra)
• Test for BLPOP replication on role change. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)
• prepareClientToWrite() error handling improvements. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)
• Remove dict.c no longer used function. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)

Cluster changes

None

Sentinel changes

None

–[ Redis 3.0.0 RC6 (version 2.9.106) ] Release date: 24 mar 2015

Upgrade urgency: HIGH because of bugs related to Redis Custer and replication.

This is the 6th release candidate of Redis 3.0.0. This release fixes important issues discovered during stress testing, and implements safest behavior for blocking operations during clients reshardings, and a new much needed functionality of Redis Cluster manual failovers.

In order to fix certain bugs quite a bit of refactoring was needed which is usually non advisabble in a Release Candidate, but needed in order to end with a clean fix.

General changes

• [FIX] Redis (non clustered & clustered) replication bug involving blocking operations: see issue #2473. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)

Cluster changes

• [FIX] clientsArePaused() fix crashing the old master during manual failover. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)

• [FIX] Lua scripts replication in Redis Cluster was totally broken. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)

• [FIX] Redirect clients blocked into list operations when the hash slot they are blocked into is migrated to another instance or the cluster state turns into “fail”. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)

• [NEW] TAKEOVER option for CLUSTER FAILOVER implemented. It is now possible to fix a cluster manually in the minority side of the partition, for example in order to allow for multi DC setups & recovery. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)

Sentinel changes

No changes in Sentinel.

–[ Redis 3.0.0 RC5 (version 2.9.105) ] Release date: 20 mar 2015

Upgrade urgency: Moderate for Redis Cluster users, low otherwise.

This is the 5th release candidate of Redis 3.0.0, released in order to fix a moderate bug in Redis Cluster. This RC does not shift in the future the Redis 3.0.0 final release which is scheduled in a few days (we are in the process of finishing the documentation for Redis Cluster).

General changes

• [FIX] Fix LATENCY command crash. (Salvatore Sanfilippo, thx to Ingmar)

• [FIX] Config: missing activerehashing option support in CONFIG SET added. (Salvatore Sanfilippo, thx to Bill Anderson)

• [FIX] Fix for backtrace generation issue. (Mariano Pérez Rodríguez, Matt Stancliff, Salvatore Sanfilippo)

• [NEW] Redis-cli --latency-dist backported from unstable. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)

Cluster changes

• [FIX] Avoid redundant SELECT in MIGRATE. (Tommy Wang, Salvatore Sanfilippo)

• [FIX] More robust slave check in CLUSTER REPLICATE. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)

• [FIX] Fixed possible Redis Cluster node crash due to wrong separation of concerns between getNodeByQuery() and Cluster global state update fnuction. (Salvatore Sanfilippo, thx to Ingmar)

• [NEW] Add command CLUSTER MYID to easily featch instance ID. (Michel Martens)

Sentinel changes

• [NEW] Support for CLIENT command added. It was missing in the command table. (Leandro López)

–[ Redis 3.0.0 RC4 (version 2.9.104) ] Release date: 13 feb 2015

Upgrade urgency: High for Redis if you use LRU eviction, low otherwise.

This is the 4th release candidate of Redis 3.0.0, it fixes problems with LRU eviction that are not present in older release (2.8.x is not affected) and adds new tools to inspect latency and load-test LRU.

General changes

• [FIX] redis-cli CSV output NIL spurious newline removed. (Matt Collier)

• [FIX] Memory efficiency test in unit test is now much faster: it affacted the total “make test” execution time in a bad way. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)

• [FIX] Fixes and improvements to dict.c and LRU eviction. Redis 3.0.0 new LRU eviction had bugs creating high latency spikes when LRU was happening during the keys dictionary rehashing. This bug is not present into 2.8, was 3.0 specific. As a side effect of this issue dict.c is now improved, and LRU algorithm is more precise (better approximates true LRU). This was a joint effort, see issue #2306 for details. (Oran Agra, Sun He, Salvatore Sanfilippo). Thanks to Charsyam for spotting an integer overflow.

• [NEW] New latency tool: redis-cli --latency-dist is able to show an xterm-256 based spectrum of latencies over time. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)

• [NEW] redis-cli --lru-test implemented (cache workload simulator). (Salvatore Sanfilippo)

• [NEW] redis-cli --stat now shows LOAD when Redis is loading data.

• [NEW] Support “1G” etc. units in CONFIG SET. (Chris Lamb, Salvatore Sanfilippo)

Cluster changes

• None.

Sentinel changes

• None.

–[ Redis 3.0.0 RC3 (version 2.9.103) ] Release date: 30 jan 2015

Upgrade urgency: High for Redis Cluster users, low otherwise.

This is the third release candidate for Redis 3.0.0, the new RC fixes several critical issues with Redis Cluster.

General changes

• [FIX] AOF bug unlikely to happen in practice and mostly harmless: child process segfaults when parent is not reachable via pipe. (Sun He)
• [FIX] Scripting engine now reports an error when misused with Lua debug hooks, instead of crashing. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)

Cluster changes

• [FIX] Several issues with Redis Cluster internal nodes objects handling. (Matt Stancliff & Salvatore Sanfilippo)

• [FIX] Improvements in the Cluster test. (Matt Stancliff & Salvatore Sanfilippo).

• [FIX] Cluster memory leaks / double frees (Matt Stancliff).

• [FIX] /dev/urandom surrogate for generation of unique IDs in a more cheap way. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)

• [FIX] Fixes and improvements to PING / PONG packets gossip sections in order to improve (and fix) failure detection and speedup cluster info propagation. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)

• [NEW] CLUSTER count-failure-reports command added. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)

Sentinel changes

No changes for Sentinel.

–[ Redis 3.0.0 RC2 (version 2.9.102) ] Release date: 13 jan 2015

Upgrade urgency: LOW.

This is the second release candidate of Redis 3.0.0. The major changes are back porting of things implemented into the unstable branch while this was still possible (with the new development model adopted only bug fixes will be merged in the future).

RC2 also fixes a few Redis Cluster non critical bugs.

General changes

• [FIX] A number of minor bug fixes.

• [NEW] Diskless replication backportede.

• [NEW] Lua bitops and updated cmsgpack backported.

• [NEW] Transparent Huge Pages warnings and reporting backported.

Cluster changes

• [FIX] Fix PUBLISH cluster bus message count field.

• [FIX] It is no longer possible to write outside node hash slots using Lua.

• [FIX] Valgrind warnings (no actual bugs).

• [FIX] Less strict in acceptiong myself->ip if it’s not populated.

• [NEW] Better testing of Lua scripts.

Sentinel changes

No changes to Sentinel.

–[ Redis 3.0.0 RC1 (version 2.9.101) ] Release date: 9 oct 2014

This is the first release candidate of Redis 3.0.0.

General changes

• [FIX] An very large number of small fixes, old and new, merged in the context of a the issue #1906. Please see the issue page here for exact credits: https://github.com/antirez/redis/pull/1906 of each commit. (Matt Stancliff and many others).

• [FIX] SAVE is no longer propagated to AOF / slaves.

• [FIX] GETRANGE test no longer fails for 32 bit builds (Matt Stancliff).

• [FIX] Limit SCAN latency when the hash table is in an odd state (very few populted buckets because rehashing is in progress). (Xiaost and Salvatore Sanfilippo)

• [NEW] Redis is now able to load truncated AOF files without requiring a redis-check-aof utility run. The default now is to load truncated (but apparently not corrupted) AOFs, you can change this in redis.conf. (Salvatore Sanfilippo).

• [NEW] DEBUG POPULATE two args form implemented. It is now possible to call it with DEBUG POPULATE <count> <prefix>. Default prefix is “key:” as usually.

• [NEW] INCR: Modify incremented object in-place when possible. This results in speed improvements + possibly better memory locality.

Cluster changes

• [FIX] Cluster: claim ping_sent time even if we can’t connect.

• [FIX] redis-trib should not abort easily on connection issues.

• [FIX] Cluster test: less console-spammy resharding test.

• [FIX] Fix logic to detect we are among a minority.

• [FIX] Process gossip section only for known nodes.

• [NEW] Redis Cluster is stable and tested enough, there is a clear MVP, so it was promoted from beta to stable.

• [NEW] New unit 09, Pub/Sub across the cluster.

• [NEW] New unit 08, update messages.

• [NEW] New cluster option to work with partial slots coverage.

• [NEW] More chatty cluster slaves when failover is stalled. They log reason with rate limiting, only when reason changes or a given time has elapsed.

Sentinel changes

• [FIX] Sentinel critical bug fixed: the absolute majority was computed in a wrong way because of a programming error. Now the implementation does what the specification says and the majority to authorize a failover (that should not be confused with the ODOWN quorum) is the majority of all the Sentinels ever seen for a given master, regardless of their current state.

• [FIX] Resolved a memory leak in the hiredis library causing a memory leak in Redis Sentinel when a monitored instance or another Sentinel is unavailable. Every reconnection attempt will leak a small amount of memory, but in the long run the process can reach a considerable size.

• [NEW] Sentinel: ability to announce itself with an arbitrary IP/port to work in the context of natted networks. However this is probably still not enough since there is no equivalent mechanism for slaves listed in the master INFO output. (Dara Kong and Salvatore Sanfilippo)

–[ Redis 3.0.0 Beta 8 (version 2.9.57) ] Release date: 29 jul 2014

This is the 8th beta of Redis 3.0.0.

General changes

• [FIX] Solaris compilation issues. (Matt Stancliff, Salvatore Sanfilippo)

• [FIX] Allow shared integer objects if maxmemory policy is not LRU based. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)

• [FIX] PFSELFTEST: less false positives. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)

• [FIX] Fail SYNC if background save child aborted due to a signal. (Yossi Gottlieb)

• [NEW] Latency framework backported from unstable branch. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)

• [NEW] AOF rewrite improved for latency. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)

• [NEW] Pub/Sub PING. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)

• [NEW] Much faster ZUNIONSTORE. (Kyle Hubert, Salvatore Sanfilippo)

• [NEW] Faster ll2string() implementation. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)

Cluster changes

• [FIX] CLUSTER RESET: Flush slave dataset on reset. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)

• [FIX] Replica migration: don’t migrate to masters that never had slaves in the past, but only to masters that remained orphaned after failure events. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)

• [NEW] redis-trib: allow to reshard in non-interactive way. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)

• [NEW] Cluster test: unit 04, check consistency during resharding. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)

• [NEW] Cluster test: unit 05, slave selection. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)

• [NEW] Cluster test: unit 06, slaves with stale data can’t failover. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)

• [NEW] Cluster test: unit 07, replicas migration. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)

Sentinel changes

• No Sentinel changes in this release.

–[ Redis 3.0.0 Beta 7 (version 2.9.56) ] Release date: 30 jun 2014

This is the 7th beta of Redis 3.0.0.

General changes

• [FIX] Scripting fixes backported from unstable, see Redis 2.8.12 changelog for more info. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)

• [FIX] Cancel SHUTDOWN if initial AOF is being written. (Matt Stancliff)

• [NEW] New command: COMMAND, for commands introspection (Matt Stancliff & Salvatore Sanfilippo)

• [NEW] hiredis: Update to latest version. (Matt Stancliff)

• [NEW] Jemalloc updated to 3.6.0. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)

Cluster changes

• [FIX] Cluster: clear NOADDR flag when updating node address. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)

• [NEW] New CLUSTER SLOTS command to simplify Cluster clients operations. (Matt Stancliff)

• [NEW] More Cluster tests. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)

• [NEW] Log when failover authorization are granted / denied. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)

Sentinel changes

• [FIX] A few Sentinel bugs fixed and improvements, see Redis 2.8.12 changelog for more info. (Salvatore Sanfilippo & Matt Stancliff)
• [NEW] New Sentinel-Client handshake protocol, ROLE command, CLIENT KILL, all backported to 3.0 branch. (Salvatore Sanfilippo)

–[ Redis 3.0.0 Beta 6 (version 2.9.55) ] Release date: 9 jun 2014

This is the 6th beta of Redis 3.0.0.

General changes

• [FIX] Fix software watchdog signal handler crash due to re-entering.
• [FIX] Better Lua number -> string conversion for Lua scripts.
• [FIX] Serious replication bug when min-slaves-* feature is used in slaves configuration fixed.
• [FIX] Blocking pop on lists now works when the list is created by commands other than PUSH (for example SORT STORE).

Cluster changes

• [FIX] CRITICAL: For a bug in the implementation of CLUSTER SET-CONFIG-EPOCH introduced with beta-3 (especially beta-4 where the command is actually used by redis-trib), a configEpoch for a node could jump backward, breaking the eventual consistency property of the slots -> nodes mapping in the cluster.

Sentinel changes

• No changes for Sentinel in this release.

–[ Redis 3.0.0 Beta 5 (version 2.9.54) ] Release date: 26 may 2014

This is the 5th beta of Redis 3.0.0. It does not include any real worthwhile change (just three days passed since the previous beta), but fixes two stupid bugs preventing cluster tests to pass.

–[ Redis 3.0.0 Beta 4 (version 2.9.53) ] Release date: 23 may 2014

This is the fourth beta of Redis 3.0.0.

General changes

• [NEW] Scripting engine performances improvements.

• [NEW] Log format slightly changed to report current node role.

• [FIX] Correct the HyperLogLog stale cache flag to prevent unnecessary computation.

Cluster changes

• [NEW] redis-trib: ability to import data from standalone Redis instances.

• [NEW] redis-trib: “fix” subcommand much better at fixing errors.

• [NEW] CLUSTER FAILOVER FORCE implemented.

• [NEW] CLUSTER RESET implemented, it is now possible to completely reset nodes and create a new cluster without restarting anything.

• [NEW] Slave validity factor (max estimated data age to still failover) is now under the control of the user, and can be configured via redis.conf or CONFIG SET. Option name cluster-slave-validity-factor.

• [NEW] Cluster test: failure detection and failover initial tests.

• [NEW] CLUSTER MEET: better error messages when address is invalid.

• [NEW] Bulk-accept new Cluster nodes in the Cluster bus instead of performing just a single accept() per event fired.

• [FIX] Bypass data_age check for manual failovers.

• [FIX] Fixed data_age computation / check integer overflow.

• [FIX] Various fixes to Tcl client.tcl Redis Cluster client used in tests.

• [FIX] Better handling of stolen slots.

• [FIX] Don’t accept cluster bus connections during startup.

Sentinel changes

• [NEW] Generate +config-update-from event when a new config is received.

• [NEW] Log when a failover will be re-attempted again.

• [FIX] Sentinel: Add “dir /tmp” directive in example sentinel.conf.

–[ Redis 3.0.0 Beta 3 (version 2.9.52) ] Release date: 5 may 2014

This is the third beta of Redis 3.0.0.

General changes

• [NEW] New data structure: the HyperLogLog (see 2.8 release notes).

• [NEW] Lexicograhical range queries in sorted sets (see 2.8 release notes).

• [NEW] LRU algorithm precision greatly improved.

• [FIX] Redis is now much more responsive to reply with LOADING / BUSY errors.

Cluster changes

• [NEW] Cluster testing framework and initial tests.

• [NEW] Cluster epochs collision resolution (make Redis Cluster more resilient to admin and programming errors).

• [NEW] Persist / fsync some global state to ensure correct crash-recovery semantics.

• [NEW] New command introduced: CLUSTER SET-CONFIG-EPOCH, still not used by redis-trib. Will be used to speedup the assignment of unique epochs to different nodes at cluster creation time. For now this is handled as a side effect of the cluster epochs collision resolution.

• [FIX] Different fixes to redis-trib cluster creation.

• [FIX] Fix an error in the CLUSTER NODES output for nodes slots.

Sentinel changes

• [NEW] Sentinels are now able to send update messages in a peer-to-peer fashion even if no Redis instances are available. Now the Sentinel liveness property that the most updated configuration in a given partition is propagated to all the Sentinels is extended to partitions without reachable instances.
• [NEW] Sentinel safety properties are now ensured in a crash-recovery system model since some state is persisted on disk before replying to other nodes, and reloaded at startup.
• [NEW] Sentinel now uses CLIENT SETNAME so that it is easy to identify Sentinels using CLIENT LIST among other clients.
• [NEW] Sentinel failure detection and reconnection code improved.

–[ Redis 3.0.0 Beta 2 (version 2.9.51) ] Release date: 11 mar 2014

This is the second beta of Redis 3.0.0.

General changes

• [FIX] Sometimes the absolute config file path was obtained in a wrong way. This happened when there was a “dir” directive inside the config file and at the same time the configuration file was given as a relative path to redis-server or redis-sentinel executables.

• [FIX] redis-cli: Automatically enter --slave mode when SYNC or PSYNC are called during an interactive session.

• [FIX] BITCOUNT: fixed unaligned access causing issues in sparc and other archs not capable of dealing with unaligned accesses. This also makes the code faster in archs where unaligned accesses are allowed.

• [FIX] Force INFO used_memory_peak to match peak memory. This generated some confusion among users even if it was not an actual bug.

• [FIX] Fixed an critical EVALSHA script cache bug: scripts executed may not propagate to AOF / Slaves correctly under certain conditions. See issue #1549 at Github for more information.

• [FIX] Fixed multiple bugs resulting into closing the link with master or slave during replication without good reasons. This will result in useless resynchronizations, or infinite loops where the replication link can’t be established.

• [FIX] Don’t count the time needed to populate the buffers of clients waiting in MONITOR mode when populating the Slow Log entries.

• [NEW] Redis-cli updated to use SCAN instead of random sampling via RANDOMKEY in order to implement --bigkeys feature. Moreover the implementation now supports pipelining and reports more information at the end of the scan. Much faster, much better. A special thank you to Michael Grunder for this improvement.

• [NEW] redis-cli now supports a new --intrinsic-latency mode that is able to meter the latency of a system due to kernel / hypervisor. How to use it is explained at http://redis.io/topics/latency.

• [NEW] New command BITPOS: find first bit set or clear in a bitmap.

• [NEW] CONFIG REWRITE calls are now logged.

• [NEW] AOF write errors (like no space on device) no longer abort Redis if the fsync policy is none or every second. The database enters a read-only mode where every write is refused with an error. Normal operations are restored as soon as Redis is able to append again data to the AOF file.

• [NEW] Sentinel now accepts SHUTDOWN command.

Cluster changes

• [FIX] Bind the first interface listed in the “bind” configuration directive if any, in order to perform outgoing connections. This fixes Cluster usage when an address is bound but there are multiple interfaces that may be used to connect with other nodes.

• [FIX] When an “Importing” slot is closed via CLUSTER SETSLOT NODE … increment the configEpoch in the special case it is zero.

• [FIX] Current transaction is invalidated on redirection errors.

• [FIX] Abort if port does not allow for a valid cluster bus port that is always at fixed +10000 offset.

• [FIX] Keys extraction algorithm fixed for ZUNIONSTORE/ZINTERSTORE and SORT.

• [FIX] Better failover timeout and retry times: failover should now work reliabily when node-timeout is very small (a few milliseconds).

• [FIX] Don’t allow SORT GET/BY options in Cluster mode.

• [FIX] Clear importing/migrating state when turning from master to slave role.

• [FIX] Set slot error if we receive an update for a busy slot.

• [FIX] Update node configEpoch on UPDATE messages.

• [NEW] Support multi-key operations as long as keys resolve to the same hash slot, and the slot is not migrating, or it is migrating but all the mentioned keys are available.

• [NEW] New DEBUG command CMDKEYS available to debug / test keys identification in Redis commands.

• [NEW] redis-trib: create subcommand is now able to assign spare slaves.

• [NEW] redis-trib: new subcommand ‘call’. Exec command in all nodes.

Sentinel changes

• [FIX] Sentinel “IDONTKNOW” error removed as it does not made sense with the new Sentinel design. This error was actually a fix for a design error in the first implementation of Sentinel.

• [FIX] Sentinel: added a missing exit() call to abort after config file checks at startup. This error was introduced with an improvement in a previous 2.8 release.

• [FIX] Sentinel: better nodes fail over start time desynchronization to avoid split-brain during the voting process needed to get authorization to fail over. This means the system is less likely to need to retry and will fail over faster. No changes in behavior / correctness.

• [NEW] Sentinel unit tests and framework. More tests needed and units must be improved in order to have less false positives, but it is a start and features a debugging console that is useful to fix tests or to inspect bugs causing tests failures.

• [NEW] New Sentinel events: +/-monitor and +set used to monitor when an instance to monitor is added or removed, or when a configuration is modified via SENTINEL SET.

–[ Redis 3.0.0 Beta 1 (version 2.9.50) ] Release date: 11 Feb 2014

This is the first beta of Redis 3.0.0.

Migrating from 2.8 to 3.0

Redis 2.8 is mostly a strict subset of 3.0, you should not have any problem upgrading your application from 2.8 to 3.0. However this is a list of small non-backward compatible changes introduced in the 3.0 release:

• The log format was modified. The prefix of each line included the pid in the following format [1234]. Now instead it is 1234:? Where ’?’ is actually the role of the instance. M for master, S for slave, C if this process is a saving child (for RDB/AOF), and X for Sentinel.

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Credits: Where not specified the implementation and design is done by Salvatore Sanfilippo. Thanks to Pivotal for making all this possible. Also many thanks to all the other contributors and the amazing community we have.

See commit messages for more credits.

Cheers, Salvatore