How we saved 100 terabytes of memory by optimizing 1.1.1.1’s DNS cache

How we saved 100 terabytes of memory by optimizing 1.1.1.1’s DNS cache Big Pineapple , the platform behind 1.1.1.1 , Gateway DNS , DNS Firewall , AS112 , and several other Cloudflare DNS services, stores over 250 billion DNS cache entries at any given time. At that scale, wasting a single byte per entry costs more than 250 gigabytes of memory across our fleet.

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• Big Pineapple , the platform behind 1.1.1.1 , Gateway DNS , DNS Firewall , AS112 , and several other Cloudflare DNS services, stores over 250 billion DNS cache entries at any given time.
• At that scale, wasting a single byte per entry costs more than 250 gigabytes of memory across our fleet.
• Five successive changes to how cache entries are stored in memory cut the per-entry footprint by over 50%.
• Across our fleet, these changes freed up roughly 100 terabytes of memory, equivalent to the amount of RAM in 130 of our Gen 13 servers .
• Insert throughput rose 43% and lookup latency dropped 19%, as fewer allocations and better memory locality meant we did not trade speed for space.
• What we cache On cold start, Big Pineapple starts out with an empty cache.