Origin Range Requests: Serving large files without range-request tuning
Curated from Cloudflare Blog
Most storage backends treat range requests as simple, independent lookups. This approach works until traffic spikes, at which point fragmented byte-range fetches can saturate origin bandwidth with redundant partial reads. Cloudflare’s recent work in Pingora addresses this architectural gap by introducing coordinated partial fetches. Instead of letting every cache node independently request missing chunks, the system aggregates these requests, ensuring the origin serves each byte range only once. This shift from naive caching to coordinated retrieval significantly reduces p99 latency for large object retrieval, a critical improvement for SREs managing high-volume data pipelines. The takeaway is clear: if your infrastructure serves large files, audit your cache layer for redundant origin calls. Implementing request coalescing or similar coordination mechanisms can dramatically reduce upstream load and improve tail latency without requiring additional hardware.
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.
— Cloudflare Blog