You're likely hitting max_concurrencymax_concurrency
. Colin Mollenhour has made significant updates to the Redis integrations (and his Redis Session integration) in his Github repo modules.
I suggest you upgrade to the most recent version, which batches SUNIONs to avoid massive wait times.
Aside from this I've seen max_concurrencymax_concurrency
hit while bots are crawling. Because of this we've, on occasion, made updates to the Bot settings in Collin's module.
See here for more information:
https://github.com/colinmollenhour/Cm_RedisSession#bot-detection