GoKawiilCloudflare tests Zstandard compression in Pingora to shrink cache storage
Cloudflare built a prototype called Cache Transcoding, developed during an intern project, that compresses eligible cached assets with Zstandard before writing them to disk inside its Pingora proxy. Assets stay compressed while stored and while moving between data centers via Tiered Cache, then get decoded only when served to the client. Early tests show this shrinks eligible assets to about a third of their original size with only a small CPU overhead.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
With RAM and disk prices climbing sharply, squeezing more capacity out of existing hardware is a direct cost lever for any company running large-scale storage infrastructure. Because the compression happens once per asset but the savings recur every time it's reused, the approach could yield outsized returns in bandwidth and storage at Cloudflare's scale, and may offer a blueprint other CDN and cache operators could adopt.
- Cloudflare's Cache Transcoding compresses cached assets with Zstandard before disk storage and decompresses only at serving time.
- The technique cut eligible asset sizes to roughly one-third of original size with minor added CPU cost.
- Savings compound over repeated cache reuse, potentially freeing petabytes of effective capacity and cutting inter-data-center bandwidth.
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See Samsung 990 PRO NVMe SSD on Amazon → Affiliate link — we may earn a commission on purchases, at no extra cost to you. Product picked by AI based on this article; it is not a tested recommendation.Source: blog.cloudflare.com, 2026-09-01
Published there as: “We could save petabytes of cache storage with Zstandard and Pingora”
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