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

Cloudflare outlines how rewriting its request handling layer from FL1 (NGINX + LuaJIT) to FL2 (Rust) enabled it to overcome cache-related latency issues on AMD EPYC 5th Gen Turin (Gen 13) processors. The post details profiling that showed higher L3 miss rates and DRAM latency on Gen 13, incremental hardware and PQOS tuning experiments, and production results where FL2 delivered up to 2x throughput, significantly reduced latency, and better power efficiency, allowing Cloudflare to deploy Gen 13 at scale.