Cloudflare 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.