I've wrote in in the background section of Readme.

Basically, I worked in a cloud company in a team that provided a managed service for Redis and Memcached. I witnessed lots of problems that our customers experienced due to scale problems of Redis. I knew that these problems are solveable but only if the whole system would be redesigned from scratch. At some point I decided to challenge the status quo, so I left the company and..and here we are.

Impressive to back yourself and leave your job to tackle such an interesting problem.

Yeah, some call it stupidity... Honestly, it's really irrational thing to do. My last company were good to me but i got the itch...

Sorry, missed your second question. Redis is using fork-based save for snapshotting and full replica sync. This means that memory pages are duplicated on write. That consumes more memory than DF implementation that implements algorithmic point-in-time snapshotting. In addition DF was designed to use less overhead memory in its keys table. As for the why, you can read about it here: https://github.com/dragonflydb/dragonfly#background