AL-Redis (AngiesList.Redis)

The AngiesList.Redis library contains a few useful classes:

• A high performance Session State HttpModule that can replace the built-in Session module
• A simple, bucketed Key-Value store

Redis Session State HttpModule (AngiesList.Redis.RedisSessionStateModule)

RedisSessionStateModule is a IHttpModule that can replace ASP.NET's default Session module. It has the following features/differences:

• Session data is stored in Redis (duh)
• This module does NOT do the per request locking that the default module does (see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178587.aspx ), which means that multiple request under the same SessionId can be processed concurrently.
• Session items are stored and accessed independently from items in a Redis Hash. So when session is saved at the end of a request, only the session items that were modified during that request need to be persisted to Redis.

To use with Integrated Pipeline mode: Create a remove then an add in the modules element inside the system.webServer element in your web.config like so:

<modules>
  <remove name="Session" />
	<add name="Session" type="AngiesList.Redis.RedisSessionStateModule, AngiesList.Redis" />
</modules>

For IIS 6 or earlier or Classic Pipeline mode: Do the same except in the httpModules element in the system.web element.

Bucketed Key-Value store (AngiesList.Redis.KeyValueStore)

Example usage:

var tags = KeyValueStore.Bucket("tags");
tags.Set("redis", "The swiss army knife data structure server");

var description = tags.GetStringSync("redis");

You can optionally set an expiration (in seconds) when you use Set:

KeyValueStore.Bucket("contentCache").Set("about_us", "We're awesome!", 600);

There are more getter methods:

• For binary data (GetRawSync() returns byte[])
• For whatever type T you want. GetSync returns T and handles the (de)serialization from and to T for you.
• For callback based async operations, there are asyncronous version of all the Get_ methods. Example:

bigNumbers.Get<Int64>("a_trillion", (num, exc) => {
  if (exc == null) {
    //do something with num
  }
});

TODO:

• add locking support (like the SQL Server provider), make it optional done.
• add option to use different serializers
• create a quick benchmark program