GoKawiilCloudflare cuts 100TB of RAM usage in Pingora Backend Router via consistent-hashing fix
Cloudflare engineers found that its internal load-balancing service, Pingora Backend Router, was consuming far more memory than necessary in its pingora-ketama consistent-hashing library. By reworking the underlying algorithm with better math and Rust code, the team eliminated the excess memory usage across its global fleet.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
At Cloudflare's scale, even marginal per-node memory savings translate into massive infrastructure gains, and this fix alone freed over 100TB of RAM worldwide, following a similar DNS-related saving the month before. It highlights how algorithmic efficiency, not just hardware scaling, remains critical for running dense, multi-tenant infrastructure economically.
- Cloudflare reclaimed 100TB+ of RAM by optimizing consistent hashing in Pingora Backend Router.
- The excessive memory use stemmed from inefficiencies in the open-source pingora-ketama library.
- This follows another 100TB memory reduction achieved by the DNS team the previous month.
Source: blog.cloudflare.com, 2026-09-18
Published there as: “Saving another 100TB of RAM with math (and Rust)”
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