Redis / Create new .rdb file while Redis is still running - redis

Question

I use Redis, and today I start to get the following exception:
Can't save in background: fork: Cannot allocate memory
As I understand, this error appears because my DB is too big, and there is no memory for this process.
So I start to delete tables, but the problem is that Redis doesn't success to write it to the disc, and in face it doesn't know about this changes.
I decided to create new .rdb file (in /etc/redis.config), and then change the file path with the new RDB file:
dbfilename dump_cache_new.rdb
Then, I will reload all the data which critical to me (I can do it - its data from my file system), and restart redis service.
The problem is that I can't create this file, because redis is now executing with the old path (and Redis has to run, because other process takes some critical data from it).
How can I create this dump_cache_new.rdb file, while redis is still running with the old path?

Answer 1

If you want to change the snapshot file name (or most other configuration parameters) on a running instance of Redis, use the CONFIG SET command. Based on that documentation page, it looks like dir and dbfilename are both parameters than can be set on a live instance.
Another option to consider is using the synchronous SAVE command, which doesn't require a fork.
You almost never want to call SAVE in production environments where it will block all the other clients. Instead usually BGSAVE is used. However in case of issues preventing Redis to create the background saving child (for instance errors in the fork(2) system call), the SAVE command can be a good last resort to perform the dump of the latest dataset.
It's a pretty severe operation, but if you're already at the point of dumping data to make the save work, this would at least allow you to first make a snapshot.