That's much more interesting data, but it clearly shows that the reason Redis was performing better is because it's caching a ton of data in memory, whereas MyS

That's much more interesting data, but it clearly shows that the reason Redis was performing better is because it's caching a ton of data in memory, whereas MySQL was constantly hitting the disk for access. This seems to be a misconfiguration of either your kernel settings or MySQL settings. If Redis effectively cached your entire dataset in RAM, then MySQL could have done so as well (or the kernel could have). I'm guessing that you configured MySQL in a way that caused the kernel to fight with the database over memory usage.