Database / ValKey Interview questions
Explain the internal working of the Valkey single-threaded event loop?
The core event loop, built on OS facilities like epoll or kqueue, multiplexes many client sockets on a single thread instead of spawning one thread per connection.
Each command that reaches the front of the loop is executed to completion against the in-memory dataset before the next one starts, which is what gives Valkey's commands their atomicity without needing explicit locks around data structures.
The same loop also drives periodic background maintenance, often called the server cron, which handles tasks like the active expiration cycle and incremental resizing of internal hash tables between client requests.
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