Cloudflare says that it has freed up roughly 100TB of RAM across its global fleet without reconfiguring any physical RAM modules in its servers, and that it did so by redesigning how each DNS cache entry is laid out in memory. In a technical blog post, systems engineer Sebastiaan Neuteboom gave us an in-depth look at five Rust-level changes to Big Pineapple, the platform behind the 1.1.1.1 resolver, that shrank each cached entry from 953 bytes to 420 bytes and made the cache faster in the process, with insert throughput up 43% and lookup latency down 19%. The recovered memory matches the combined DDR5 in 130 of Cloudflare's 768GB Gen 13 servers, reclaimed in the face of server-grade DDR5 prices that are on track to double year over year.
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