1) Is this worthwhile? Looks like ~500 CPU cores were saved (are these real cores, or does this include hyperthread cores?). I don't know cloudflare's costs, but this seems like single digit servers and probably savings only in the $XX,XXX range. Not nothing, but do you expect a positive ROI on engineering?
2) If you do want to go to this detail, did you consider in putting the filter at the deserialization step, preventing the headers from being created in the first place?
Power savings forever.
Lower carbon emissions.
etc
Nice to see a company that cares about making things 1% faster rather than trying to analyse headers with AI to sell me sandals or something stupid like that.
That's million dollars.
So lets very conservatively assume 2 months. 12 months in a year so 6 40k savings a year. Thats 240k which is still below a fang salary but yeah it's per year forever and also as cloudflare gets bigger the 40k would turn into 50k without anybody acknowledging it.
Setting up a offshore office takes time and focus that could be spent on other initiatives etc.