Memory Optimization

Cloudflare 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.

blog.cloudflare.com · 2026-09-18

Cloudflare 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%.

blog.cloudflare.com · 2026-08-27