Saving another 100TB of RAM with math (and Rust)

2026-09-21

Cloudflare reduced the memory footprint of its Pingora Backend Router by 100TB through algorithmic optimizations to the pingora-ketama library. The team determined they could remove 90% of the hashes generated for each server without causing errors or collisions. They rolled out the change in stages to avoid invalidating cached content across the network all at once.