Cloudflare redesigned its DNS architecture to overcome severe scaling bottlenecks caused by managing zones with upwards of 20 million records. The legacy process struggled because reading, encoding, and comparing full zones consumed massive amounts of memory under modern workloads. The updated pipeline implements a targeted build planner and consolidated scheduler that isolates minimal safe updates, eliminating unnecessary full-zone recalculations. These operational efficiencies allowed the engineering team to safely reduce resilience wait times and accelerate authoritative DNS data delivery.
Key points
Consolidating work per zone and planning minimal updates cut peak memory consumption by 8…: Consolidating work per zone and planning minimal updates cut peak memory consumption by 85 percent.
Halving the delay before writing data to Quicksilver substantially accelerates DNS propag…: Halving the delay before writing data to Quicksilver substantially accelerates DNS propagation across the network.
Removing full rebuilds for simple settings adjustments grants Cloudflare significant oper…: Removing full rebuilds for simple settings adjustments grants Cloudflare significant operational headroom to handle future traffic growth.
Sources checked by our analysis pipeline: 1
When I last wrote about our DNS propagation pipeline in 2022, the Zone Builder received about 250 DNS record changes per second. Today it receives about 700, nearly three times as many, plus about 100 other events, such as zone setting changes. However, the number of events was never the real problem. The problem was the kind of work some of those events needed, and how that work grows with the size of a zone. Some zones now hold more than 20 million records, and we expect them to keep growing toward hundreds of millions.
Each event starts a clock that measures how long it takes us to turn that change into data our authoritative DNS servers can use. We call that work a build. A build reads the current database state, converts it into the format used at the edge, and writes any changes to Quicksilver.
In 2022, per-record builds were 150 times faster than full builds on average. On a test zone with one million records, per-record builds were 4,250 times faster. We ended that post with the…
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