I’ve mentioned before that Redis, a NoSQL in-memory datastore often used for caching, is red hot and receiving high praise from developers. But how well does it really stand up to the competition?

Ichi, a developer for Kick News with a background in IT engineering, did some informal testing of how Dusan Majkic’s Windows port of Redis compares to Microsoft Windows Server AppFabric. It’s an informal, unscientific comparison but gives a good idea of how well these perform. You can find Ichi’s post about the results here.

“To run the test, I created an ASP.Net MVC 3 project and used a System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch() to time the execution of putting and retrieving 1,000 4 byte strings and then the same with a byte array of a 115KB image,” Ichi wrote. He averaged the results of six runs together and found that in general Redis performed faster than AppFabric, but AppFabric is “no slouch.”

Here’s a graph of the results – “1” is set and “2” is get. Ichi isn’t sure why it took Redis longer to get the larger byte array, but there was one particularly long test that may have skewed the results. That suggests that the Windows port of Redis might have a bit of variability that Windows admins and developers will want to test further before putting Redis into production, but Ichi’s results are otherwise encouraging.

(hat tip: MyNoSQL)