Cloudflare cut DNS cache memory 56%, freeing 100TB fleet-wide.

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Cloudflare just shrank every single entry in its DNS cache by fifty six percent, and because that cache holds over two hundred fifty billion entries at once, the change frees about one hundred terabytes of memory across their entire server fleet. The system is called Big Pineapple, the Rust based resolver that's powered 1.1.1.1 since twenty twenty three. Engineers found waste hiding in plain sight: growable containers reserving space they'd never use, oversized enum types forcing padding onto every entry, and DNS records stored as parsed structures instead of raw bytes. Fixing all five issues dropped each entry from nine hundred fifty three bytes to just four hundred twenty, and it sped up cache inserts by forty three percent as a side effect. No new hardware, no protocol changes, just cleaner Rust. It's proof that at Cloudflare's scale, the boring five percent of a system is worth more than most teams' headline features.