We use Redis fairly heavily for Adafruit IO, and I started wondering if there might be some better/faster options for our MQTT Redis message queue. It looks like there are many options that are much faster than Redis.

Here are some of the options:

  • ZeroMQ - No server needed, but setup might become more complex. Mosca support exists.
  • nanomsg - Same as zeromq, but a younger project. Performs better in benchmarks. POSIX compliant & written in C.
  • NATS - Requires server, but still much faster than Redis. Can be scaled horizontally.

I think ZeroMQ might be our best bet. Here’s a post with some benchmarks.