Cloudflare engineers optimize DNS build services for twice the speed and 85% lower RAM usage

Cloudflare is up to its optimization shenanigans again. Not too long after finding 100 TB of memory savings between the DNS cache's couch cushions, and another 100 TB of saved RAM by improving its task-server routing, the company's engineers are back with the hat trick. This time, they managed to halve DNS zone rebuild times and cut that procedure's memory usage by 85% across its network.

A "DNS zone" is the collection of records, settings, and metadata for a given domain like tomshardware.com. The records are the main part, containing IP addresses, hostnames, or text lines including website and mail server IPs, subdomains, domain redirections, and spam-control or certificate info. If you're a Cloudflare customer, when you update a record pointing your website to a new IP, or change one of the domain's settings, the service pushes this information onto its many thousands of DNS servers.

This sounds easy enough until you realize that Cloudflare's DNS fleet is huge, and …