[unusualmonkey]

My 2c:

1) Is this worthwhile? Looks like ~500 CPU cores were saved (are these real cores, or does this include hyperthread cores?). I don't know cloudflare's costs, but this seems like single digit servers and probably savings only in the $XX,XXX range. Not nothing, but do you expect a positive ROI on engineering?

2) If you do want to go to this detail, did you consider in putting the filter at the deserialization step, preventing the headers from being created in the first place?

[aetherspawn]

It might only be $XX,XXX but it is forever.

Power savings forever.

Lower carbon emissions.

etc

Nice to see a company that cares about making things 1% faster rather than trying to analyse headers with AI to sell me sandals or something stupid like that.

[unusualmonkey]

It's not forever, in another comment they're reworking their entire internal comms protocol.

[cryptonym]

That's such a tiny corner case but yet something you can easily publish. Fuelling marketing content to ends with hundred geeks discussing if what CF is doing makes sense or how much they care about perf.

That's million dollars.

[_zoltan_]

I don't understand your point about the ROI. Let's say it's 40k a year for 5 years that's 200k. That's a multi year salary Hungary/Poland (I have no idea of CF has offices there.)

[lesuorac]

Not just that but there's no time frame in the blog post. They mention that Pingora was released a few months ago (which was really 10) however I doubt they spent 10 months on the singular change.

So lets very conservatively assume 2 months. 12 months in a year so 6 40k savings a year. Thats 240k which is still below a fang salary but yeah it's per year forever and also as cloudflare gets bigger the 40k would turn into 50k without anybody acknowledging it.

[unusualmonkey]

And if it introduces a bug that causes downtime that could cost millions.

Setting up a offshore office takes time and focus that could be spent on other initiatives etc.

[saagarjha]

If an engineer spends a couple of days on it then the savings seem worthwhile?