Cloudflare tests compressing cached objects between data centers

Cloudflare’s cache-transcoding prototype stores eligible text responses as Zstandard-compressed objects and keeps them compressed while transferring between cache tiers. It decodes them before delivery to clients. This trades additional processing for more effective disk capacity and less internal network traffic, while avoiding recompression of images, video and other content unlikely to shrink.

Cloudflare · Sep 1, 2026

Why it matters

A concrete systems example of changing an internal representation without changing the bytes clients receive.

More context

The experiment uses Pingora and targets uncompressed text with a known length of at least 4 KiB. A controlled corpus compressed roughly 2.8 times; decoding still costs CPU on each serve. This is a September catch-up case study. Try the design idea on representative workloads rather than assuming the same compression ratio.

Keep in mind

This is a prototype, not a confirmed fleet-wide rollout or achieved petabyte saving. The performance campaign used two deliberately compressible assets; broader traffic testing remains necessary.

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