Cloudflare prototypes cache transcoding to increase effective storage

Cloudflare said it has prototyped Cache Transcoding, which stores eligible cache assets as Zstandard-compressed data inside its Pingora proxy. In controlled testing, eligible assets averaged one-third of their original on-disk size, while the company estimated an extra CPU cost of a few percent under its traffic and reuse assumptions. The prototype targets uncompressed, compressible 200 OK text responses of at least 4 KiB; media, precompressed content, range requests and unknown-length bodies are excluded.