Origin Range Requests: Serving large files without range-request tuning
Naive byte-range caching can waste gigabytes of origin bandwidth on small requests.
Naive byte-range caching can waste gigabytes of origin bandwidth on small requests.
The short version
- We rebuilt our cache architecture in Pingora to coordinate partial fetches automatically, cutting R2 p99 latency in half.
- 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.
What happened
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.
Why it matters
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%.
Summary by Nerd News Network. Read the full article at Cloudflare Blog via the links above and below.