We halved DNS build delay and cut memory use by 85%

Re:We halved DNS build delay and cut memory use by 85% by jgrahamc on Monday November 02, 2026 @12:57PM (#50340772)

Cloudflare always had a pretty strong culture around optimisation. If you go back and read the blog there are a lot of blogs about reducing CPU, latency, RAM, etc. through software. It's one of the key features of how Cloudflare has been successful and an important part of succeeding in today's world.

Source: I was Cloudflare's CTO.

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Re:We halved DNS build delay and cut memory use by 85% by rancar2 on Monday November 02, 2026 @05:10PM (#50344614)

And Cloudflare is making money on infrastructure margins not eyeballs (ie advertising like Google), so the incentives are well aligned for this to continue.

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Re:We halved DNS build delay and cut memory use by 85% by kevin_thibedeau on Monday November 02, 2026 @07:29PM (#50346328)

Why the heavy reliance on Javascript when native code would bring performance and energy savings?

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Re:We halved DNS build delay and cut memory use by 85% by cowlevel on Monday November 02, 2026 @09:38PM (#50347301)

isn't that their job? you can't deliver native code to web browsers.

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Re:We halved DNS build delay and cut memory use by 85% by x-complexity on Monday November 02, 2026 @10:37PM (#50347739)

1) This decision was made pre-AI, where human familiarity mattered. Since the devs that would've used this were familiar with JS, that was what they were stuck with.

2) You're targeting to the wrong person. Blame the managers at Netscape for pushing Brendan Eich into creating JS, rather than letting him use Scheme as the scripting language. From there, it would've made sense to allow Scheme to be compiled into bytecode.

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Re:We halved DNS build delay and cut memory use by 85% by lmz on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @03:13AM (#50349376)

Why would Scheme be more likely to lead to bytecode than JS?

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Re:We halved DNS build delay and cut memory use by 85% by jgrahamc on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @10:43AM (#50353404)

There's a lot of native code at Cloudflare. Just go look up the optimisations we did around crypto or compression in assembly. Or every time we use a compiled language like Go or Rust or C++.

I'd also say that when you look at JITed language like Lua and JavaScript the performance is pretty damn impressive. As with so many things it depends what you're doing.

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Re:We halved DNS build delay and cut memory use by 85% by BLKNSLVR on Monday November 02, 2026 @10:23PM (#50347639)

I was wondering why you were no longer CTO, congrats on the board role (seems that it's been a bit over 18 months).

I don't know you, but you've seemed to be pretty open and honest on HN, which is appreciated.

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Re:We halved DNS build delay and cut memory use by 85% by jgrahamc on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @10:42AM (#50353389)

I decided to step down as CTO because I'd been at it for a long time and the board role allowed me to stay involved without being there every single day. I wrote about my "retirement" here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/three-chapters-at-cloudflare-pro...

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Re:We halved DNS build delay and cut memory use by 85% by thephyber on Monday November 02, 2026 @11:54PM (#50348244)

I enjoy the CloudFlare tech blogs and I'm pretty familiar with you and the company.

I worked with 2 of the cofounders at their previous company and some of the original prototype was written at my apartment at the time.

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