valkey

Valkey 9.2.0-rc2 - Released Wed 04 November 2026

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Upgrade urgency LOW: This is the second release candidate of Valkey 9.2.0.

New Features and Enhanced Behavior

• Add new DELEX command to conditionally delete a string key when its value matches (IFEQ) or differs from (IFNE) a given value by @lightsigma96 (#4607)
• Add Zstd as a streaming compression codec for RDB persistence and replication, offering better compression ratios than LZ4 by @sarthakaggarwal97 (#3798)
• Support streaming-compressed RDB preambles in AOF bases, so compressed full-sync RDB files can be reused directly as AOF bases by @sarthakaggarwal97 (#4754)
• ACL GENPASS and the hash function seed draw randomness from the configured OpenSSL 3 provider when built with TLS, supporting deployments that require a validated crypto module by @MarkAtwood (#4339)
• Support forkless full synchronization to replicas, serving disk and diskless full syncs from a background-thread snapshot without forking by @nitaicaro (#4797)

Performance and Efficiency Improvements

• Speed up sorted set score updates in listpack encoding by replacing the score in place when the member keeps its position by @charsyam (#3491)
• Fix quadratic slowdown in HRANDFIELD and SRANDMEMBER with counts on collections whose elements differ only in letter case by @madolson (#5167)
• Bound the time spent per cycle evicting keys from the client tracking table, avoiding long stalls after lowering tracking-table-max-keys by @tanmayBeginsJourney (#4775)
• Speed up the INFO command by around 5% by pre-allocating the output buffer by @charsyam (#3413)
• Reclaim client-side caching tracking table entries left by disconnected clients, fixing a memory leak under read-heavy workloads, and include the tracking table in active defrag by @rayjinghaolei (#4190)
• Speed up ZPOPMIN and ZPOPMAX on B+tree encoded sorted sets by detaching edge items without a key search or copy by @charsyam (#4852)
• Counting a hash's fields with expirations is now O(1) for hashtable-encoded hashes by tracking the volatile set size on each mutation by @frostzt (#4829)
• Speed up AOF command propagation by serializing commands directly into the AOF buffer, removing an allocation and copy per command by @charsyam (#3496)
• Cache the earliest event-loop timer to avoid an O(N) scan per iteration, reducing overhead with many timers such as RDMA connections by @royenheart (#4354)
• Speed up HGETALL, HKEYS and HVALS with exact-length reply headers, fused bulk replies, and entry prefetching by @jjuleslasarte (#4417)
• Eliminate false sharing in per-thread memory usage counters, improving throughput with I/O threads on SMT x86 systems by @omerrubi-amzn (#4107)
• Read-only list iteration (e.g. LRANGE, LPOS) no longer decompresses and recompresses quicklist nodes in place, cutting CPU cost on compressed lists by @murphyjacob4 (#4782)
• Speed up ZSCAN on btree-encoded sorted sets by avoiding temporary member and score copies and prefetching items by @charsyam (#4856)
• Reduce cache-line false sharing on IO thread activity and job counters for better multi-threaded IO performance by @omerrubi-amzn (#4976)
• PHDELPREFIX now bounds its temporary path copies to 64KiB per batch, avoiding large untracked memory spikes on long shared prefixes by @madolson (#5179)

Bug Fixes

• Reject module write commands while the server is paused for writes, preventing a crash from module timer callbacks during CLIENT PAUSE WRITE or CLUSTER FAILOVER by @smkher (#3645)
• Fix event loop busy-spinning on virtual machines by not using raw TSC for the monotonic clock when the kernel clocksource is not tsc by @quanyeyang (#4707)
• Fix a crash in ValkeyModule_HashHasStringRef on a missing or expired field and correct wrong return values in the hash stringRef module APIs by @ShubhamTaple (#4504)
• Fix a server abort on a RESTORE payload declaring a string length that overflows the allocation size; such payloads are now rejected as bad data by @enjoy-binbin (#4733)
• Fix ZINTER/ZINTERSTORE returning input-order-dependent scores when a weighted term is 0*inf; a NaN weighted score now counts as 0, matching ZUNION by @leomurillo (#4997)
• Fix crashes, lookup hangs, and duplicate set members when keys or elements reach 2 GiB, caused by storing string lengths in a 32-bit integer by @madolson (#5133)
• Fix module global defrag resuming on the wrong module or with a stale cursor when MODULE UNLOAD runs between defrag cycles by @madolson (#5154)
• Propagate PFADD elements applied before a corrupted-HLL INVALIDOBJ error so replicas and the AOF stay consistent with the primary by @madolson (#5128)
• Fix a server crash in SCRIPT DEBUG SYNC mode when a debugger command arrives split across more than one read by @madolson (#5127)
• Fix a server panic when a Lua script returns or raises an error table whose metatable has an __index metamethod that raises an error by @madolson (#5118)
• Fix forkless BGSAVE producing a corrupt snapshot when SWAPDB runs without being replicated, such as from a script with replication disabled by @madolson (#5116)
• Let FLUSHALL and SHUTDOWN cancel a forkless save that is finalizing its file, so a stale snapshot can no longer overwrite the newer dump.rdb by @madolson (#5121)
• Fix a server crash when a module never sets a postponed reply length; the leftover placeholder is now filled with an empty array by @madolson (#5159)
• Fix a memory leak when server.register_function named arguments are repeated in a different letter case by @madolson (#5120)
• Preserve expired but not yet reaped hash fields across listpack-to-hashtable conversion so their deletion is properly reaped and propagated by @frostzt (#4704)
• Fix a double-decremented item count when background iteration is terminated with a SWAPDB or FLUSHDB event queued by @JimB123 (#4750)
• Fix GEOSEARCH returning empty results for exact zero-distance matches on builds where floating-point contraction breaks the latitude distance calculation by @Baraa-Hasheesh (#4777)
• Reject inline commands containing a raw NUL byte with a protocol error instead of leaving the connection stalled by @cjx-zar (#4759)
• Fix a memory leak on normal shutdown caused by I/O worker threads not being terminated and cleaned up by @roshkhatri (#4710)
• XACKDEL with KEEPREF now replies 1 instead of -1 when acknowledging an entry whose stream message was already deleted, matching the ACKED and DELREF modes by @adityamukesh (#4843)
• Fix listpack encoding incompatibility that caused RDB load and replication failures for entries of certain lengths between 9.0 and 9.1.x by @jjuleslasarte (#4819)
• Reject relative expire times in SET/GETEX, RESTORE, and ValkeyModule_SetExpire that overflow when added to the current time, preventing server aborts from negative expires by @madolson (#4880)
• ACL DIGEST now includes role definitions, so editing a role's rules changes the reported fingerprint by @melancholictheory (#4694)
• Fix a server crash when loading an ACL file containing a selector with an unmatched parenthesis by @magic-peach (#4214)
• Fix a segfault on Alpine/musl when Lua is built as a module, caused by a symbol clash on an internal clock function by @mohammedgqudah (#4270)
• Fix lex range seeks, NaN score bound handling, and a memory leak in B+tree sorted sets, and resolve ZRANGEBYLEX LIMIT offsets in logarithmic time by @xiaocj (#4644)
• Fix expired hash fields left untracked after listpack-to-hashtable conversion, which could crash the server on a later write and leave fields that are never reaped by @beyondwin (#4894)
• Restore acceptance of hexadecimal float sorted set scores (such as 0x10), keeping replication and AOF replay compatible with Valkey 9.0 by @quanyeyang (#4875)
• Sorted set range commands with a negative LIMIT offset now return an empty result instead of a spurious element on btree-encoded keys by @xiaocj (#4637)
• Fix HSETEX and HGETEX failing to parse their arguments when the key is named fields by @sebxt (#4945)
• Fix a crash when active defrag's deferred keys outlive a keyspace replacement such as FLUSHDB/FLUSHALL ASYNC, SWAPDB, or a replica's pre-sync flush by @taham0 (#4968)
• Fix LSET on 64-bit builds silently modifying the wrong element for out-of-range indexes instead of returning an index out of range error by @charsyam (#4823)
• Fix a heap buffer overflow in cluster Pub/Sub message construction; oversized PUBLISH and SPUBLISH payloads are now rejected with an error in cluster mode by @roshkhatri (#5030)
• Lex range commands on btree-encoded sorted sets with mixed scores now match listpack results, preventing primary/replica divergence via ZREMRANGEBYLEX and ZRANGESTORE by @pirate329 (#4954)