I would like to quote below lines from: http://antirez.com/news/94 "It is multi threaded: This is true, and in my goals there is to make Redis I/O threaded (like in memcached, where the data access itself is not threaded, basically). However Redis, especially using pipelining, can serve an impressive amount of requests per second per thread (half a million is a common figure with very intensive pipelining. Without pipelining it is around 100,000 ops/sec). In the vanilla caching scenario where each Redis instance is the same, works as a master, disk ops are disabled, and sharding is up to the client like in the “memcached sharding model”, to spin multiple Redis processes per system is not terrible. Once you do this what you get is a shared-nothing multi threaded setup so what counts is the amount of operations you can serve per single thread. Last time I checked Redis was at least as fast as memcached per each thread. Implementations change over time so the edge today may be of the one or the other, but I bet they provide near performances since they both tend to maximize the resources they can use. Memcached multi threading is still an advantage since it makes things simpler to use and administer, but I think it is not a crucial part. "