GoKawiilCloudflare cuts DNS cache memory use by 50%, freeing 100TB across 1.1.1.1 fleet
Cloudflare engineers made five successive changes to how DNS cache entries are stored in memory for Big Pineapple, the platform underlying 1.1.1.1 and related DNS services that hold over 250 billion cache entries at once. The changes shrank the per-entry memory footprint by more than half, freeing roughly 100 terabytes across the company's servers while also boosting insert throughput by 43% and cutting lookup latency by 19%.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
At Cloudflare's scale, even a single wasted byte per cache entry translates into hundreds of gigabytes of lost memory, so structural efficiency gains compound massively across a global DNS infrastructure. The fact that speed improved alongside memory savings shows the optimizations reduced allocations and improved memory locality rather than trading one resource for another, a rare win-win for infrastructure at this scale.
- Optimizing DNS cache data structures freed about 100TB of memory, equal to 130 Gen 13 servers' worth of RAM.
- Insert throughput rose 43% and lookup latency dropped 19%, showing memory savings didn't come at the cost of performance.
- ECS-heavy data centers benefit most since they store multiple cached answers per query, multiplying the impact of these optimizations.
Source: blog.cloudflare.com, 2026-08-27
Published there as: “Saving 100 terabytes of memory by optimizing 1.1.1.1's DNS cache”
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