{
  "id": 18117515,
  "title": "Cloudflare engineers optimize DNS build services for twice the speed and 85% lower RAM usage",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/11/04/cloudflare-engineers-optimize-dns-build-services-for-twice-the-speed",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-11-04T12:00:00.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Tom's Hardware",
    "slug": "tom-s-hardware",
    "url": "https://www.tomshardware.com/networking/cloudflare-engineers-optimize-dns-build-services-for-twice-the-speed-and-85-percent-lower-ram-usage-finer-grained-processes-only-do-work-and-data-movement-thats-needed"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Cloudflare's engineers have made significant strides in optimizing their DNS build services, achieving double the speed and reducing RAM usage by 85%. A DNS zone comprises domain records, settings, and metadata, with Cloudflare's DNS fleet handling an average of 800 zone changes per second. These changes require substantial RAM and network traffic, and consistency across the fleet is crucial as varying records can lead to errors.\n\nPreviously, Cloudflare's engineers managed to save 100 TB of memory by improving DNS cache and task-server routing. In their latest optimization, they focused on halving DNS zone rebuild times and cutting memory usage by 85%. Zone records contain IP addresses, hostnames, settings, and domain metadata. When a record is updated or domain settings are changed, the service pushes this information across thousands of DNS servers. Ensuring consistency is vital, as incorrect information could lead to website issues.\n\nThe team first improved their internal software to include reasons and additional information in zone change events, enabling proper classification. Consequently, specific setting changes can now use smaller and shorter builds. For instance, changes to apex records, metadata, Universal SSL, nameservers, and wildcards trigger smaller procedures. For domains with numerous records, updates are now performed piecewise.\n\nAdditionally, the engineers combined two separate planning and implementation schedulers into one and enhanced its operation. By detecting multiple changes affecting the same zone, they can now combine them. The new scheduler also improved concurrency capacity, fulfilling requests shortly after being issued and in a consistent cadence. These changes led to a median build time reduction from 7.7 seconds to 3.3 seconds.",
  "summary": "Cloudflare engineers are at it again, optimizing DNS-building services for twice the speed and 85% less RAM usage",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}