Ah yes I remember trying out Redis with telnet, it was helpful at the very beginning. Thankfully command-line clients came around soon enough. Also, the protoco

Ah yes I remember trying out Redis with telnet, it was helpful at the very beginning. Thankfully command-line clients came around soon enough. Also, the protocol as it is today was only introduced in Redis 1.2, and wasn't around at the very beginning. It's true that the parsing time is small compared to the network round-trip, but Redis being single-threaded means that while it's parsing a large nested command and allocating memory as it goes through it… well nothing else is being processed. I'm pretty familiar with the costs of parsing this protocol, being the original author of the phpredis extension. Written in C, it's a high-performance client whereas pure-PHP clients can't use the same zero-copy tricks or careful memory management in general to avoid repeated calls to strlen/malloc/memcpy/free (in that order). In Webdis – another high-performance Redis tool I wrote – protocol parsing with Hiredis is similar to HTTP parsing in the sense that it's where most CPU cycles are spent. I'm not really sure why Salvatore chose to keep the text-based protocol when his focus was so often on performance. I'm not aware of any attempts made by him or other people to change the protocol, but it would be interesting to see how much of a difference this could make.