Why Cloudflare Replaced Nginx with Rust‑Powered Pingora: Performance Gains Explained

For years Cloudflare relied on Nginx as part of its HTTP proxy stack, but it now announces that Pingora, an internally developed proxy written in Rust, has replaced Nginx, offering a faster, more efficient, and more versatile platform for current and future products.

Pingora processes over a trillion requests each day and delivers better performance while using roughly one‑third of the CPU and memory that Nginx required.

As Cloudflare’s scale grew, the limitations of Nginx became apparent – architectural constraints that hurt performance and difficulty adding complex features, compounded by a less active community and “closed‑door” development.

Today Cloudflare’s primary focus is proxying traffic between its network and origin servers; Pingora powers the CDN, Workers fetch, Tunnel, Stream, R2, and many other features.

The switch to a new proxy was driven by Nginx’s performance ceiling and missing capabilities. Cloudflare chose Rust because it provides memory safety without sacrificing speed, and the company built its own HTTP library to meet diverse needs. Pingora uses a multithreaded architecture instead of a multiprocess model.

Performance metrics show a median TTFB reduction of 5 ms and a 95th‑percentile drop of 80 ms. New connections per second are only one‑third of the old service, while connection reuse rose from 87.1 % to 99.92 %, cutting handshake attempts by a factor of 160 and saving an estimated 434 years of handshake time per day.

In production, under identical traffic loads, Pingora reduces CPU and memory consumption by about 70 % and 67 % respectively. Beyond speed, the Rust implementation makes the proxy more secure. Pingora is not yet open‑source, though Cloudflare plans to release it in the future.

For more details, see the official Cloudflare blog: How We Built Pingora .