AI Weekly Malaysia

Cloudflare prototyped a system called Cache Transcoding that encodes eligible cached assets with Zstandard (zstd level 3) inside Pingora before writing to disk, shrinking eligible assets to roughly 1/3 of their original on-disk size on average. The trade-off is a small one-time CPU cost at cache fill time, in exchange for ongoing storage and cross-data-center bandwidth savings. The prototype was built during an internship and is not yet a shipped product feature.

Why: If you operate any caching layer or CDN-like infrastructure, this is a concrete data point that zstd level 3 can cut on-disk cache footprint by ~66% with minimal CPU overhead, and that compressing at cache-write time (rather than only honoring origin content-encoding) is worth evaluating. Builders running their own edge proxies or origin-facing caches should benchmark zstd against their current compression to see if the storage/bandwidth savings justify the CPU cost at their scale.