Cache metadata can bankrupt a service before payloads do; Cloudflare reports…

Cache metadata can bankrupt a service before payloads do; Cloudflare reports shaving about 100 TB by reducing per-entry overhead (see their blog). Their example shows per-entry shape, allocator behavior, and TTL policy often dominate raw value size at scale. If you run AI backends, session stores, result caches, or rate-limit tables, budget memory at the entry-structure level, measure your allocator, and treat cache-key design and TTL policy as first-order capacity controls.