There are obvious reasons for needing networking access, but even when you don't need it: 1) Redis is much more memory efficient than your average programming

There are obvious reasons for needing networking access, but even when you don't need it: 1) Redis is much more memory efficient than your average programming language. 2) Redis handles persistence and replication for you. Not a joke. 3) Accessing data with atomic operations on complex data types from your application using multiple threads can create more problems. 4) Your application is free of doing other stuff if you use a non blocking client, if you are asking Redis to do computationally intensive tasks. 5) There is no easy way to model Redis sorted sets, in many very high level languages, at the same speed, without writing a C extension.