DEL

Syntax

DEL key [key ...]

Time complexity: O(N) where N is the number of keys that will be removed. When a key to remove holds a value other than a string, the individual complexity for this key is O(M) where M is the number of elements in the list, set, sorted set or hash. Removing a single key that holds a string value is O(1).

ACL categories: @keyspace, @write, @slow

Removes the specified keys. A key is ignored if it does not exist.

Return

Integer reply: The number of keys that were removed.

Examples

dragonfly> SET key1 "Hello"
OK
dragonfly> SET key2 "World"
OK
dragonfly> DEL key1 key2 key3
(integer) 2

Benchmark

Sustained throughput for DEL on a single instance, measured against Redis and Valkey on identical hardware. Higher is better.

Dragonfly10,250,000OPS

Valkey2,380,0004.3× OPS

Redis1,960,0005.2× OPS

02.63M5.25M7.88M10.5M

operations / second

Methodology

Hardware	Server: m7g.8xlarge (arm64) · Client: c6gn.8xlarge (arm64)
Client	32 threads, 5 connections, pipeline 30
Dataset	100M keys, 128B values, uniform key distribution
Duration	300s (10s warmup), 1 trial
Measured	2026-07-28

Ran through dfly_bench until throughput stabilized; the reported figure is the median throughput sampled during the run. Harness and raw output: dragonflydb/benchmarking.