Redis is an in memory but persistent on disk data store. So memory is used to serve data, but disk is used in order to persist. This is the Redis model since the start. What I was questioning in the linked group message is to go for disk not just for persistence but also to take ready-to-serve organized data.
Actually in the persistence side we plan to do more work to make Redis better, for instance Redis 2.4 that is entering release candidate can save/load most databases on disk ten times faster.
In the future we plan to explore a new AOF format that is more compact and faster to process, and the ability to rewrite the log without a background process (BGREWRITEAOF).
BGSAVE in cron is not needed, you can configure Redis (and this is the default config) to automatically save every N seconds if there are at least M changes in the dataset. It is possible to configure multiple save points. More info: http://redis.io/topics/persistence
Actually in the persistence side we plan to do more work to make Redis better, for instance Redis 2.4 that is entering release candidate can save/load most databases on disk ten times faster.
In the future we plan to explore a new AOF format that is more compact and faster to process, and the ability to rewrite the log without a background process (BGREWRITEAOF).