Cloudflare has freed another 100 TB of RAM by changing how its servers map hashes. The company reduced the number of hash entries per server from 100,000 to 10,000, a 90% drop that eliminated significant cache bloat. The change is the latest in a series of memory-saving efforts at the edge network.
The savings come from tuning the hash-mapping algorithm rather than adding hardware. With fewer entries to maintain, the cache uses less memory while still directing traffic correctly. Tom's Hardware notes this is not the first time Cloudflare has achieved such a large reduction; the company previously saved 100 TB of RAM with a different optimization.