Cloudflare saved 100TB of memory with 5 changes to 1.1.1.1's DNS cache
ritakozlov · x · 2026-08-28
Cloudflare's engineering blog details how Big Pineapple, the platform behind 1.1.1.1 and other DNS services, holds over 250 billion DNS cache entries at any time—at that scale, wasting one byte per entry costs 250GB+ across the fleet.
Five successive changes to how cache entries are stored cut per-entry footprint by over 50%, freeing roughly 100TB of memory—equivalent to the RAM of 130 Gen 13 servers. The cache also got faster: insert throughput rose 43% and lookup latency dropped 19%, as fewer allocations and better memory locality meant no speed-for-space tradeoff.
The post covers the cache design (Rust CacheKey struct, EDNS Client Subnet causing multiple cached versions per query), a model deep-dive in large-scale systems engineering.
Related event: Cloudflare Cuts 100TB of Memory with Rust DNS Cache Optimizations(3 posts)→
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