Cloudflare says DNS cache optimizations for 1.1.1.1 freed 100TB of RAM while improving lookup speed

Cloudflare says five changes to Big Pineapple, the platform behind 1.1.1.1 and other DNS services, cut each DNS cache entry’s memory footprint by more than 50%. Across more than 250 billion cached entries, the work freed about 100TB of RAM and improved performance, with insert throughput up 43% and lookup latency down 19%.

At Cloudflare’s scale, small data-structure inefficiencies become fleet-wide infrastructure costs, making memory optimization a major lever for capacity and performance. The gains also show how careful cache design can reduce hardware demand without sacrificing speed, especially for services handling ECS-heavy DNS traffic.