Applications that don’t use Redis as a persistent store, and enable pipelining, will be hit less hard, yes. Applications that connect to Redis remotely will also be hit less hard — loopback makes this somewhat of a worst-case scenario.
> Test performed with AOF enabled
AOF is a type of persistence: https://redis.io/topics/persistence
Most of the time, I've used Redis with (I think) RDB persistence, just in case. Usually we've used it as an in-memory cache.
Ok, that makes a lot of sense, thanks!