How Cloudflare Optimized their Reverse Proxy with Tries

Cloudflare significantly cut latency by 75% in their reverse proxy service Pingora by utilizing a trie data structure for optimizing the removal of internal HTTP headers. Their original method, which iterated through potential headers to remove, was inefficient. By inverting the search and then applying a trie, they reduced the average runtime from 3.65 microseconds to 0.93 microseconds. This optimization is crucial given their scale, handling 35 million requests per second.