Cloudflare frees up 100TB of RAM by shrinking 1.1.1.1’s DNS cache entries — with 250 billion DNS entries cached at any given time, one wasted byte costs 250GB

Cloudflare redesigned 1.1.1.1’s DNS cache, shrinking each Big Pineapple entry from 953 bytes to 420 bytes.

Per-instance p99 resident memory fell from 9.3GB to 5.3GB, while insertion throughput rose 43% and lookup latency dropped 19%.

The optimization recovered roughly 100TB of fleet memory, enabling larger caches, higher hit rates, and less upstream traffic without adding hardware.