We halved DNS build delay and cut memory use by 85% (blog.cloudflare.com)
90 points by wondersky 5 hours ago
thephyber 3 hours ago
I have been wondering if the memory scarcity would lead to a desire to optimize software to be more efficient.
Curious what the R&D / efficiency development ROI is on reducing memory footprint. I suppose we should both consider current ROI and near future ROI (as the price of memory will likely stay high for at least another 1-2 years).
jgrahamc 2 hours ago
Cloudflare always had a pretty strong culture around optimisation. If you go back and read the blog there are a lot of blogs about reducing CPU, latency, RAM, etc. through software. It's one of the key features of how Cloudflare has been successful and an important part of succeeding in today's world.
Source: I was Cloudflare's CTO.
placatedmayhem 3 hours ago
Coincidentally, I just got angry this weekend about my Mac with 64GB of RAM going OOM because of poorly optimized applications. Use of web tech, especially Electron, was common among basically all of the offending applications. Whether Electron itself or just poor coding, I'm not sure, but there's a pattern.
renehsz 3 hours ago
Electron needs to die.
But it's convenient. I can't really fault people for using it.
zamadatix 22 minutes ago
Aperocky 2 hours ago
claude-code is using a suspicious amount of memory and doesn't seem to care about optimizing it nearly as much as the others.
MisterMunchkin an hour ago
lenerdenator 3 hours ago
Electron's more-or-less just Chrome without... erm... chrome, so it makes sense that it's bloated and uses too much RAM. Even well-constructed and efficient JavaScript executed through it will do so on top of a bunch of stuff your application might not even need.
One thing that I really hope we see out of the LLM revolution: a return to native applications. You could argue that Electron cross-platform apps made sense when you had to pay a team to maintain two or three (at least) native clients; you can't make that argument anymore when the marginal cost of a line of code is $0.00.
floydnoel 3 hours ago
jauntywundrkind an hour ago
nikanj 3 hours ago
Server-side: sure
Client-side: lol sucks to be you
mhovd 3 hours ago
Cloudflare doesn't get enough credit for their series of overall great technical blog posts.
schainks 3 hours ago
They also read like actual human curated content, to boot.
LoganDark 2 hours ago
My LLM detector started going off around here:
> Why doesn't the Zone Builder just rebuild the setting that changed?
> It should, and that is where we ended up. However, proving when it was safe took most of the work. A record event identifies what changed. A zone event can come from many Cloudflare products, may not say why the zone changed, and can alter data shared by several zones with the same name. Choosing too much work wastes capacity. Choosing too little can leave stale or incorrect DNS data at the edge.
Re-reading the start of the post with that in mind, I'm fairly sure the article was generated by LLM.
With that said, curated it sure is. Aside from the smelly phrasing, the actual content is fairly dense and engaging. Not all of Cloudflare's LLM-generated posts are this good, but this one is fairly alright.
InsidiousWombat 3 hours ago
Isn't 700 changes a second like... really low, considering their scale and amount of domains they manage ?
straygar 3 hours ago
There's about 360 million domains (according to Verisign as of March 31, includes inactive sites as well) and if Cloudflare manages about 1/3 to 1/2 of them, that's like 180 million domains at most.
700 changes per second is 1.8 billion changes per month. I guess 10 changes per top level domain per month is quite low, which suggests a very long tail distribution, which makes sense, given that most websites are just a static page a business sets up once, with DNS changes maybe once every few years.
mvkel 3 hours ago
412M domains registered worldwide
700 changes per second implies 15% of all domains are changing daily, which is almost certainly not the case.
enedil 3 hours ago
It's well possible that some people update DNS records for their own domain every minute.
zoeysmithe 3 hours ago
I can see 15% changing daily. There's all sorts of stuff being done with dkim and other anti-spam technologies that require a txt or cname or whatever change in DNS. Companies are always whitelisting vendors and mass mailers to send as them, validating domain ownership, adding new sub-domains, changing things for Exchange/365/Google/AI stuff, changing things due to a security audit, etc.
I imagine a renewal is a change event to, at least change the expiry, and renewals are constantly happening.
toast0 3 hours ago
LoganDark 2 hours ago
It's probably more like most domains barely change at all but some of them change a lot.
likoya 34 minutes ago
I used to use cloudflare dns, but the same cloudflare harassed me the entire day testing if I'm a robot. The harassment ended after I switched the dns server. See you never again, clouflare
JulianPaul 2 hours ago
I'm very curious about the bugs (before vs. after relational) that come from an improvement like this over time