This is a guest post by Itamar Haber, Chief Developers Advocate, Redis Labs.

While catching up with the world the other day, I read through the High Scalability guest post by Anshu and Rajkumar's from Aerospike (great job btw). I really enjoyed the entire piece and was impressed by the heavy tweaking that they did to their EC2 instance to get to the 1M mark, but I kept wondering - how would Redis do?

I could have done a full-blown benchmark. But doing a full-blown benchmark is a time- and resource-consuming ordeal. And that's without taking into account the initial difficulties of comparing apples, oranges and other sorts of fruits. A real benchmark is a trap, for it is no more than an effort deemed from inception to be backlogged. But I wanted an answer, and I wanted it quick, so I was willing to make a few sacrifices to get it. That meant doing the next best thing - an unbenchmark.

An unbenchmark is, by (my very own) definition, nothing like a benchmark (hence the name). In it, you cut every corner and relax every assumption to get a quick 'n dirty ballpark figure. Leaning heavily on the expertise of the guys in our labs, we measured the performance of our Redis Cloud software without any further optimizations. We ran our unbenchmark with the following setup: