Antirez, the developer of Redis, addresses this on one of his blog posts. Essentially, it was a design choice. He made the trade off of having a single thread

Antirez, the developer of Redis, addresses this on one of his blog posts. Essentially, it was a design choice. He made the trade off of having a single threaded application to speed up development timelines and not have to worry about the short comings of developing in a multi-threaded application (atomic operations, locks, etc). He delves into the multi threaded debate about half way down the article: http://oldblog.antirez.com/post/update-on-memcached-redis-benchmark.html http://oldblog.antirez.com/post/update-on-memcached-redis-be... edit: I suppose a work around would be to shard multiple redis instances on separate cores of the same box. This would give you some of the benefits of multi-threading.