Using a single redis connection (aioredis)

My application will be sending hundreds, if not thousands, of messages over redis every second, so we are going to open the connection when the app launches and use that connection for every transaction. I am having trouble keeping that connection open.

Here is some of my redis handler class:

class RedisSingleDatabase(AsyncGetSetDatabase):

    async def redis(self):
        if not self._redis:
            self._redis = await aioredis.create_redis(('redis', REDIS_PORT))
        return self._redis

    def __init__(self):
        self._redis = None

    async def get(self, key):
        r = await self.redis()
        # r = await aioredis.create_redis(('redis', REDIS_PORT))
        print(f'CONNECTION IS {"CLOSED" if r.closed else "OPEN"}!')
        data = await r.get(key, encoding='utf-8')
        if data is not None:
            return json.loads(data)

This does not work. By the time we call r.get, the connection is closed (ConnectionClosedError).

If I uncomment the second line of the get method, and connect to the database locally in the method, it works. But then we're no longer using the same connection.

I've considered trying all this using dependency injection as well. This is a flask app, and in my create_app method I would connect to the database and construct my RedisSingleDatabase with that connection. Besides the question of whether my current problem would be the same, I can't seem to get this approach to work since we need to await the connection which I can't do in my root-level create_app which can't be async! (unless I'm missing something).

I've tried asyncio.run all over the place and it either doesn't fix the problem or raises its own error that it can't be called from a running event loop.

Please help!!!