A good day to trie-hard: saving compute 1% at a time

Cloudflare’s global network handles a lot of HTTP requests – over 60 million per second on average. That in and of itself is not news, but it is the starting point to an adventure that started a few months ago and ends with the announcement of a new open-source Rust crate that we are using to reduce our CPU utilization, enabling our CDN to handle even more of the world’s ever-increasing Web traffic. 

Motivation

Let’s start at the beginning. You may recall a few months ago we released Pingora (the heart of our Rust-based proxy services) as an open-source project on GitHub. I work on the team that maintains the Pingora framework, as well as Cloudflare’s production services built upon it. One of those services is responsible for the final step in transmitting users’ (non-cached) requests to their true destination. Internally, we call the request’s destination server its “origin”, so our service has the (unimaginative) name of “pingora-origin”.

One of the many responsibilities of pingora-origin is to ensure that when a request leaves our infrastructure, it has been cleaned to remove the internal information we use to route, measure, and optimize traffic for our customers. This has to be Continue reading