Launching Cloudflare’s Gen 13 servers- trading cache for cores for 2x edge compute performance

What this post added

This post details the transition to Cloudflare's Gen 13 server fleet, featuring AMD EPYC Turin processors with a higher core count but reduced L3 cache per core. It describes the performance challenges encountered with the legacy NGINX/LuaJIT-based request handling layer (FL1) due to increased L3 cache miss rates and memory latency. The post highlights the successful adoption of the new Rust-based request handling layer (FL2) which, by reducing cache dependency and optimizing memory access patterns, unlocked the full 2x throughput potential of the Gen 13 hardware while maintaining low latency and improving performance per watt.