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

(blog.cloudflare.com)

27 points | by wondersky 2 hours ago

3 comments

  • mhovd 0 minutes ago
    Cloudflare doesn't get enough credit for their series of overall great technical blog posts.
  • thephyber 41 minutes ago
    I have been wondering if the memory scarcity would lead to a desire to optimize software to be more efficient.

    Curious what the R&D / efficiency development ROI is on reducing memory footprint. I suppose we should both consider current ROI and near future ROI (as the price of memory will likely stay high for at least another 1-2 years).

    • placatedmayhem 32 minutes ago
      Coincidentally, I just got angry this weekend about my Mac with 64GB of RAM going OOM because of poorly optimized applications. Use of web tech, especially Electron, was common among basically all of the offending applications. Whether Electron itself or just poor coding, I'm not sure, but there's a pattern.
      • renehsz 7 minutes ago
        Electron needs to die.

        But it's convenient. I can't really fault people for using it.

      • lenerdenator 12 minutes ago
        Electron's more-or-less just Chrome without... erm... chrome, so it makes sense that it's bloated and uses too much RAM. Even well-constructed and efficient JavaScript executed through it will do so on top of a bunch of stuff your application might not even need.

        One thing that I really hope we see out of the LLM revolution: a return to native applications. You could argue that Electron cross-platform apps made sense when you had to pay a team to maintain two or three (at least) native clients; you can't make that argument anymore when the marginal cost of a line of code is $0.00.

        • floydnoel 3 minutes ago
          What I don’t understand is, why not just use a platform native webview? Mac has it at least, I think Windows does as well. You'd think it would be the same amount of work (roughly) but use a lot less memory.

          I guess developers really prioritize velocity or ease over everything. Or maybe it's business pressure or directives?

          • lenerdenator 1 minute ago
            Business pressure. Always business pressure. Sales sold a bill of goods and now you need to deliver ASAP. Hardware was cheaper than dev time. Was.

            Yes, they're getting their bonus. No, we can't hire and onboard more people to deal with the insane demands being made as a result. Why do you ask?

  • InsidiousWombat 43 minutes ago
    Isn't 700 changes a second like... really low, considering their scale and amount of domains they manage ?
    • straygar 26 minutes ago
      There's about 360 million domains (according to Verisign as of March 31, includes inactive sites as well) and if Cloudflare manages about 1/3 to 1/2 of them, that's like 180 million domains at most.

      700 changes per second is 1.8 billion changes per month. I guess 10 changes per top level domain per month is quite low, which suggests a very long tail distribution, which makes sense, given that most websites are just a static page a business sets up once, with DNS changes maybe once every few years.

    • mvkel 31 minutes ago
      412M domains registered worldwide

      700 changes per second implies 15% of all domains are changing daily, which is almost certainly not the case.

      • enedil 27 minutes ago
        It's well possible that some people update DNS records for their own domain every minute.