VALKEY-ARM(7)

💖 valkey-ARM — ARM support 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the valkey-ARM(7) manual page — yes, section 7, we're in the big leagues now ✨ this whole page is about running Valkey on ARM, and it's giving main character energy fr fr.

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🌸 NAME 🌸

valkey-ARM — ARM support 🫶

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

Valkey supports the ARM processor, like the Raspberry Pi for example, as a main platform. Periodt. 💅

While Valkey does run on Android, the future plan is to extend the testing efforts to Android too, so that it can also become an officially supported platform. Not yet tho — future vibes only 👀

And like… we genuinely believe Valkey is ideal for IoT and embedded devices. Why? Multiple reasons, let's go:

• Valkey has a very small memory footprint and very small CPU requirements. It can run on tiny little devices like the Raspberry Pi Zero without tanking the overall performance — small amount of memory, good performance, many use cases. slay. ✨
• The data structures of Valkey are often the ideal way to model IoT/embedded use cases. Some examples: accumulating time series data, receiving or queuing commands to execute, or commands to respond to and send back to remote servers, and so forth. iconic behavior honestly.
• Modeling data inside Valkey can be super useful for making in-device decisions — for appliances that have to respond very quickly, or when the remote servers are offline. no cap.
• Valkey can be used as a communication system between the processes running inside the device. group chat but make it unix 🫶
• The append-only file storage of Valkey is well suited for SSD cards. 💾
• The stream data structure was specifically designed for time series applications and has a very low memory overhead. the way that it just… fits. 😭

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🧚 Valkey /proc/cpu/alignment requirements 🧚

So here's the tea ☕ — Linux on ARM lets you trap unaligned accesses and fix them inside the kernel, so the offending program just keeps executing instead of getting hit with a SIGBUS. Rude, right? 💀

But Valkey avoids any kind of unaligned access, so there's literally no need to set a specific value for this kernel configuration. Even when kernel alignment fixing is set as disabled, Valkey should run as expected. iykyk 💅

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🎀 Building Valkey in the Pi 🎀

• Download Valkey.
• Use make as usual to create the executable.

There is nothing special in the process, bestie. The only difference? By default, Valkey uses the libc allocator instead of defaulting to jemalloc like it does in other Linux based environments. Why? Because for the small use cases inside embedded devices, memory fragmentation is unlikely to be a problem. Also, jemalloc on ARM may not be as tested as the libc allocator. 🙈

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🔥 Performance 🔥

Performance testing of Valkey was performed on the Raspberry Pi 3 and Pi 1 model B. The difference between the two Pis in terms of delivered performance is quite big — like, not even close 😭

The benchmarks were performed via the loopback interface, since most use cases will probably use Valkey from within the device and not via the network. The following numbers were obtained using Redis OSS 4.0.

🌈 Raspberry Pi 3:

• Test 1 : 5 millions writes with 1 million keys (even distribution among keys). No persistence, no pipelining. 28,000 ops/sec.
• Test 2: Like test 1 but with pipelining using groups of 8 operations: 80,000 ops/sec.
• Test 3: Like test 1 but with AOF enabled, fsync 1 sec: 23,000 ops/sec
• Test 4: Like test 3, but with an AOF rewrite in progress: 21,000 ops/sec

🦋 Raspberry Pi 1 model B:

• Test 1 : 5 millions writes with 1 million keys (even distribution among keys). No persistence, no pipelining. 2,200 ops/sec.
• Test 2: Like test 1 but with pipelining using groups of 8 operations: 8,500 ops/sec.
• Test 3: Like test 1 but with AOF enabled, fsync 1 sec: 1,820 ops/sec
• Test 4: Like test 3, but with an AOF rewrite in progress: 1,000 ops/sec

The benchmarks above are referring to simple SET/GET operations. The performance is similar for all the Valkey fast operations (the ones not running in linear time). However — sorted sets may show slightly slower numbers. noted. 📝

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🫶 and that's the whole page, bestie — every number, every flag-free fact, all of it. no skips, no summaries, we ate. 💅

signing off from the group chat — this was Valkey 9.0.0, dated 2025-10-21, and yes, it's the VALKEY-ARM(7) page. mwah 💋✨🎀