Why Redis’s Official Site Crashed: Memory OOM, Cheap Hosting, and a Quick Fix

On March 12, the official Redis website (redis.io) suffered a rare outage; surprisingly, the error page displayed a message indicating it could not connect to Redis.

Redis::CannotConnectError at / Error connecting to Redis on 127.0.0.1:6379 (Errno::ECONNREFUSED)

Seeing this, the author exclaimed “No more nesting!”

Redis creator Antirez quickly fixed the issue and explained that the outage was caused by the Try Redis online demo running on the redis.io instance, which failed to properly garbage‑collect session keys, leading to memory accumulation and an out‑of‑memory (OOM) crash.

His solution was straightforward: upgrade to a $20‑per‑month plan with 4 GB of memory and set a 1 GB limit for the allkeys‑lru eviction policy.

We also learned that the Redis website runs on a $5‑per‑month, 1 GB DigitalOcean Droplet, the cheapest standard configuration offered by the provider.

Antirez explained that this low‑cost setup is sufficient because the host uses Redis only for persistent storage and runs a single Ruby application.

In a side note, Antirez, who is from Sicily, Italy, exchanged thanks with Chinese fans on social media, recalling past mutual aid between Italy and China during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and the recent COVID‑19 response.

来源：开源中国