Origin Range Requests: Serving large files without range-request tuning

A video player seeking to the middle of a movie asks for a few megabytes. Under our old range caching, that one request could make Cloudflare pull 128 MiB from the origin and move it between data centers, sometimes after the viewer had already left. Range requests are how large files get delivered, and caching them naively easily leads to wasted network bandwidth and wasted disk operations when running a CDN at scale.

So we rebuilt how our cache handles them. For R2, Cloudflare's object storage, p99 time to first byte dropped by about half, and a follow-up improvement cut tiered cache traffic for R2 and similar workloads by about 6%.

Today, we're making that new implementation available as Origin Range Requests, a self-service feature on all plans. There's no range size to tune and no need to contact support. Turn it on with a Cache Rule, and Cloudflare handles the rest.

A request for part of a file

An HTTP range request asks for part of a resource instead of the whole resource. The client sends a normal GET with a Range header:

GET /movie.mp4 HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
Range: bytes=1048576-2097151

If the server supports the Continue reading