Redis: possible to expire an element in an array o

Question

Is it currently only possible to expire an entire key/value pair? What if I want to add values to a List type structure and have them get auto removed 1 hour after insertion. Is that currently possible, or would it require running a cron job to do the purging manually?

Answer 1

Is it currently only possible to expire an entire key/value pair?

As far as I know, and also according to key commands and document about expiration, currently you can set expiration only to specific key and not to it's underlying data structure. However there is a discussion on google groups about this functionality with outlined alternative solutions.

Answer 2

There is a common pattern that solves this problem quite well.

Use sorted sets, and use a timestamp as the score. It's then trivial to delete items by score range, which could be done periodically, or only on every write, with reads always ignoring the out of range elements, by reading only a range of scores.

More here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/redis-db/rXXMCLNkNSs