Rolling Your Own KV Store Instead of Embedding Redis

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 20:44:00 -0700

Every PHP deployment I’ve run eventually grew a Redis. Sessions, the WordPress object cache, Laravel’s cache and locks, rate limiting. ePHPm is supposed to be one binary that replaces nginx + php-fpm + Redis, so it needed a cache in the box. I didn’t want to write one. This post covers why I did anyway and how it’s built. It also covers the bug that sat in its eviction code from March until last month. Then I compare it against a stock Redis on the same machine with redis-benchmark doing the talking.

Dashmap on Luther Monson

Rolling Your Own KV Store Instead of Embedding Redis