Redis on Windows prototype

What's new in this release

• Based on Redis 2.4.11
• Removed dependency on the pthreads library
• Improved the snapshotting (save on disk) algorithm. Implemented Copy-On-Write at the application level so snapshotting behavior is similar to the Linux version.

=== Special thanks to Dušan Majkic (https://github.com/dmajkic, https://github.com/dmajkic/redis/) for his project on GitHub that gave us the opportunity to quickly learn some on the intricacies of Redis code. His project also helped us to build our prototype quickly.

Repo branches

• 2.4: save in foreground
• bksave: background save where we write the data to buffers first, then save to disk on a background thread. It is much faster than saving directly to disk, but it uses more memory.
• bksavecow: Copy On Write at the application level

How to build Redis using Visual Studio

You can use the free Express Edition available at http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-editions/visual-cpp-express.

• The new application-level Copy On Write code is on a separate branch so before compiling you need to switch to the new branch:

git checkout bksavecow

• Open the solution file msvs\redisserver.sln in Visual Studio 10, and build.

  This should create the following executables in the msvs$(Configuration) folder:

  • redis-server.exe
  • redis-benchmark.exe
  • redis-cli.exe
  • redis-check-dump.exe
  • redis-check-aof.exe

Release Notes

This is a pre-release version of the software and is not yet fully tested, because of that we are keeping the Fork/COW code on a separate branch until testing is completed.
This is intended to be a 32bit release only. No work has been done in order to produce a 64bit version of Redis on Windows. To run the test suite requires some manual work:

• The tests assume that the binaries are in the src folder, so you need to copy the binaries from the msvs folder to src.
• The tests make use of TCL. This must be installed separately.
• To run the tests you need to have a Unix command line shell installed. To run the test: tclsh8.5.exe tests/test_helper.tcl. If a Unix command shell is not installed you may see the following error: “couldn't execute "cat": no such file or directory”.

Plan for the next release

• Improve test coverage
• Fix some performance issues on the Copy On Write code
• Add 64bit support