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Cloudflare says it redesigned part of its DNS propagation pipeline so zone-setting changes no longer require rebuilding every DNS record in a zone. The company reports an 85% reduction in peak memory use and a halving of the time from a DNS change to its data being written to Quicksilver; those figures are company-reported results, and the post does not specify a measurement period or detailed benchmark conditions.
Cloudflare says changes to its DNS build pipeline have halved the time from a DNS change to its data being written to Quicksilver, while reducing peak memory use by 85%. The company says targeted builds and a new scheduler let it avoid rebuilding every record when certain zone settings change, addressing a scaling problem as some DNS zones grow to tens of millions of records.
Cloudflare’s Zone Builder converts DNS records and zone settings into data that the company’s authoritative DNS servers can use, as described in its work on optimizing 1.1.1.1’s DNS cache. Its report says the pipeline now receives about 700 DNS record changes per second, compared with about 250 when the company last described the system in 2022, as well as roughly 100 other events per second, including zone-setting changes. The report does not give a measurement window for those rates.
Previously, a zone-setting event could trigger a full build: the builder read every record in the zone, converted the records into keys, and compared them with data already in Quicksilver. Although the final write included only changed keys, reading and processing an entire large zone consumed time and memory. Cloudflare says some zones now contain more than 20 million records, with further growth anticipated—a scaling challenge also relevant to cutting memory costs without sacrificing capability.
The new targeted build planner selects a smaller amount of work when the company can establish that doing so is safe. A new scheduler also combines work for the same zone. Cloudflare says the combined changes cut peak memory use by 85%, giving the pipeline enough headroom to shorten waits previously maintained for resilience. The company attributes the halved end-to-end delay to those shorter waits; its post does not provide detailed latency figures or a benchmark methodology.
Faster Updates for Large DNS Zones
The change addresses a practical scaling constraint: a setting adjustment should not have to trigger a read and conversion of millions of records if only a small part of the served DNS data can change. Reducing that unnecessary work can free processing capacity and memory for Cloudflare’s DNS pipeline, particularly as zones grow and event volume rises.
For customers, the reported reduction in build time could mean DNS changes reach the serving system sooner. The company’s stated measure ends when data is written to Quicksilver, its distributed key-value store, which then propagates changes across Cloudflare’s network. The report does not give customer-level measurements of the full time until a change is available everywhere, so the reported halving should not be read as a guarantee for every change or location.
Cloudflare also describes a safety trade-off: a build that does too much wastes capacity, but a build that omits affected data can leave stale or incorrect DNS answers at the edge. Its planner is designed to narrow work only when the company can determine that the smaller build remains correct.
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From Zone Events to Edge Data
Cloudflare’s report describes a pipeline in which a customer or internal service changes a DNS record or zone setting. The change is stored in a database, and an event is sent through Kafka to the DNS Kafka Aggregator. That system passes relevant events to the Zone Builder, which reads the needed information, creates keys for authoritative DNS servers, and writes differences to Quicksilver.
The builder does more than copy database rows. It combines records with zone settings, applies DNS serving rules, and organizes output for the company’s servers. In a 2022 post, Cloudflare said per-record builds were 150 times faster on average than full builds; on a test zone with one million records, it reported a 4,250-fold difference. Those figures describe that earlier comparison, not the new changes’ measured performance.
Targeting zone-setting events is more complicated than targeting a record change because events may come from several products, may not identify their cause, or may affect information shared by zones with the same name. Cloudflare cites Universal SSL as an example: enabling or disabling it can affect metadata and CAA records at the zone apex, which specify which certificate authorities may issue certificates for a domain.
“The planner never turns uncertainty into less work.”
— Cloudflare, in its DNS targeted zone builds report
How the Performance Figures Were Measured
The report does not specify when the new system was deployed, the period used to calculate its 85% peak-memory reduction, or the exact workload and comparison baseline behind that figure. It also does not provide latency distributions, sample sizes, or a breakdown of results by zone size or event type. The reported improvements are therefore Cloudflare’s own measurements, not independently verified results in the supplied material.
It is also unclear how often targeted builds apply across all zone-setting events. Cloudflare says timestamp-only updates, events with missing details, and unknown changes can still trigger a full build when their effects cannot be established. The report does not quantify the share of events handled by targeted builds, or provide separate figures for how long it takes data to spread across the whole network after it is written to Quicksilver.
Expanding Safe Targeted Builds
Cloudflare says it still uses full builds when it cannot determine safely which records or shared data may be affected. The next step implied by the report is to improve the information attached to events and identify the sources and purposes of ambiguous updates, so more changes can be handled with smaller builds without risking stale output.
The company expects some zones to grow from tens of millions of records toward hundreds of millions. The post does not announce a rollout schedule, a target date for further work, or a commitment to eliminate full builds. Future reporting would be needed to establish how broadly the targeted approach is used and whether the reported reductions hold as zone sizes and event loads increase.
Key Questions
What did Cloudflare change in its DNS pipeline?
Cloudflare says it added a targeted build planner to select the smallest build it can establish is safe, along with a scheduler that combines work for the same zone. This can avoid rebuilding every record after some zone-setting changes.
What performance improvements did Cloudflare report?
The company reports an 85% reduction in peak memory use and says the time from a DNS change to its data being written to Quicksilver was halved. The supplied report does not include detailed benchmark conditions or an independent verification.
Does every zone-setting change get a targeted build?
No. Cloudflare says events that are ambiguous, incomplete, or potentially capable of affecting records anywhere in a zone can still require a full build. Its stated rule is not to reduce work when the effects of a change are uncertain.
Does the reported delay reduction mean DNS changes appear everywhere twice as fast?
Not necessarily. The reported timing ends when the changed data is written to Quicksilver. Cloudflare says Quicksilver propagates data across its network, but the supplied material does not report a separate, network-wide customer latency measurement.
Source: blog.cloudflare.com
