Simon Willison’s Weblog

21st July 2025 - Link Blog

tidwall/pogocache (via) New project from Josh Baker, author of the excellent tg C geospatial libarry (covered previously) and various other interesting projects:

Pogocache is fast caching software built from scratch with a focus on low latency and cpu efficency.

Faster: Pogocache is faster than Memcache, Valkey, Redis, Dragonfly, and Garnet. It has the lowest latency per request, providing the quickest response times. It's optimized to scale from one to many cores, giving you the best single-threaded and multithreaded performance.

Faster than Memcache and Redis is a big claim! The README includes a design details section that explains how the system achieves that performance, using a sharded hashmap inspired by Josh's shardmap project and clever application of threads.

Performance aside, the most interesting thing about Pogocache is the server interface it provides: it emulates the APIs for Redis and Memcached, provides a simple HTTP API and lets you talk to it over the PostgreSQL wire protocol as well!

psql -h localhost -p 9401
=> SET first Tom;
=> SET last Anderson;
=> SET age 37;

$ curl http://localhost:9401/last
Anderson