We architected an edge caching layer to eliminate cold starts
4 days ago
- #performance-optimization
- #cloudflare
- #edge-caching
- Mintlify serves 72 million monthly page views for developer documentation.
- Cold starts affected nearly 25% of visitors, leading to slow page loads.
- A custom edge caching layer was implemented to decouple deployments from cache invalidation.
- Cloudflare components like Workers, KV, Durable Objects, and Queues were utilized.
- Cache hit rate improved from 76% to effectively 100%.
- Two key processes: revalidations (reactive) and prewarming (proactive).
- Automatic version detection and revalidation were key innovations.
- Durable Objects were used to prevent race conditions during updates.
- Proactive prewarming was triggered by customer documentation updates.
- The system is self-healing with automatic fail-safes and timeouts.