Eek. Locking the entire data set to perform transactions? Isn't that so... MyISAM? Does rolling the transaction back work? The optimistic lock is not a great solution either: instead of deadlocking while waiting for a lock to be released, you are now stuck in a while (!saved) loop. Imagine two web pages trying to update the same resource at the same time. Also this part of the config: save 900 1 save 300 10 save 60 1…
MyISAM doesn't support transactions.
EDIT: looks like there is rollback support: http://redis.io/commands/discard