Cloudflare opens Origin Range Requests for partial file caching
Original title: Origin Range Requests: Serving large files without range-request tuning
A Cache Rule replaces per-zone range-size tuning; Cloudflare says R2 time to first byte fell by about half.
Cloudflare is offering Origin Range Requests on all plans so cache misses for HTTP range requests fetch fixed cache chunks instead of a customer-chosen slice. The company says the old design could pull 128 MiB for a small video seek and blocked concurrent streaming. It reports about a 50% drop in R2 p99 time to first byte and about 6% less tiered-cache traffic for R2-like workloads after a follow-up change.
- Customers enable it with a Cache Rule and do not set a range size.
- Missing bytes are fetched on Pingora's fixed chunk boundaries; clients still receive only the requested range.
- Requests smaller than a chunk can still cause a full chunk fetch from origin.
- The feature is available on all plans without contacting support.
- Vendors
- Cloudflare
- Products
- Origin Range RequestsR2Pingora
From the original article
7 min read at blog.cloudflare.com
Naive byte-range caching can waste gigabytes of origin bandwidth on small requests. We rebuilt our cache architecture in Pingora to coordinate partial fetches automatically, cutting R2 p99 latency in half.
By Matthew Gumport · blog.cloudflare.com
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