Sorted sets power critical use cases like leaderboards and priority queues, but Redis’s skiplist implementation pays a steep tax—37 bytes of overhead per entry. Dragonfly flips the script with a B+ tree redesign, slashing overhead to just 2-3 bytes while boosting performance. This optimization proves that revisiting “obvious” data structure choices can yield massive gains—with lessons on B+ tree trade-offs, latency wins, and the quirks of adapting traditional database-born data structures for pure in-memory use cases.
