Blog posts about performance

I’ve seen three blog posts about major performance improvements recently. Two of them are from Cloudflare: How we saved 100 terabytes of memory by optimizing 1.1.1.1’s DNS cache and Saving another 100TB of RAM with math (and Rust).

The third comes from Anthropic: How we made claude.ai 3x faster in two weeks. And they couldn’t be more different.

Starting with the title, which in the case of both Cloudflare’s posts gives a (pretty big) hint on the area of the performance improvement. They go deeper and explain in detail, what and how they optimized, explaining memory layouts and alignments, cache strategies, and so on. Overall, it is an excellent read, from which everyone can learn something. Or at least be amused by the scale of Cloudflare operations, where every byte saved on some structures stored in memory can lead to gigabytes and terabytes of savings across their datacenters.

Anthropic’s blog post has a very different goal. You wouldn’t learn much from it. Instead, you will repeatedly hear how they tasked Claude (without disclosing any prompts) and how it improved something (without disclosing exact solutions or results).

What worked best from the marketing perspective? A SEO-optimized post mentioning Claude in every other sentence or a real optimization story where one actually learn how the system operates?

For me, the answer is pretty clear.

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