> There are workloads that will saturate a redis instance's CPU
I might imagine this scenario if you're excessively using smembers and a few other slow ops, but I have yet to see CPU issues outside of bad eval's.
> require finding old keys to delete
LRU/LFU eviction is not particularly CPU intensive.
> redis to do memory defragmentation which can be fairly intensive
Active defrag has relatively negligible overhead, and assuming jemalloc even more so.