“You get Instant Purge, and you get Instant Purge!” — all purge methods now available to all customers
2025-04-01
Following up on having the fastest purge in the industry, we have now increased Instant Purge quotas across all Cloudflare plans. ...

\n
Local queues within CacheDB buffer purge operations to ensure consistent throughput without latency spikes, while the cache proxies consult CacheDB to guarantee rapid, active purges. Our updated distribution pipeline broadcasts purges directly to CacheDB instances across machines, dramatically improving throughput and purge speed.
Using CacheDB, we've reduced storage requirements 10x by eliminating lazy purge storage accumulation, instantly freeing valuable disk space. The freed storage enhances cache retention, boosting cache HIT ratios and minimizing origin egress. These savings in storage and increased throughput allowed us to scale to the point where we can offer Instant Purge to more customers.
For more information on how we designed the new Instant Purge system, please see the previous installment of our Purge series blog posts.
\nMoving on to practical considerations of using these new purge methods, it’s important to use the right method for what you want to invalidate. Purging too aggressively can overwhelm origin servers with unnecessary requests, driving up egress costs and potentially causing downtime. Conversely, insufficient purging leaves visitors with outdated content. Balancing precision and speed is vital.
Cloudflare supports multiple targeted purge methods to help customers achieve this balance.
Purge Everything: Clears all cached content associated with a website.
Purge by Prefix: Targets URLs sharing a common prefix.
Purge by Hostname: Invalidates content by specific hostnames.
Purge by URL (single-file purge): Precisely targets individual URLs.
Purge by Tag: Uses Cache-Tag headers to invalidate grouped assets, offering flexibility for complex cache management scenarios.
Starting today, all of these methods are available to every Cloudflare customer.
\nUsers can select their purge method directly in the Cloudflare dashboard, located under the Cache tab in the configurations section, or via the Cloudflare API. Each purge request should clearly specify the targeted URLs, hostnames, prefixes, or cache tags relevant to the selected purge type (known as purge keys). For instance, a prefix purge request might specify a directory such as example.com/foo/bar. To maximize efficiency and throughput, batching multiple purge keys in a single request is recommended over sending individual purge requests each with a single key.
\nThe new rate limits for Cloudflare's purge by tag, prefix, hostname, and purge everything are different for each plan type. We use a token bucket rate limit system, so each account has a token bucket with a maximum size based on plan type. When we receive a purge request we first add tokens to the account’s bucket based on the time passed since the account’s last purge request divided by the refill rate for its plan type (which can be a fraction of a token). Then we check if there’s at least one whole token in the bucket, and if so we remove it and process the purge request. If not, the purge request will be rate limited. An easy way to think about this rate limit is that the refill rate represents the consistent rate of requests a user can send in a given period while the bucket size represents the maximum burst of requests available.
For example, a free user starts with a bucket size of 25 requests and a refill rate of 5 requests per minute (one request per 12 seconds). If the user were to send 26 requests all at once, the first 25 would be processed, but the last request would be rate limited. They would need to wait 12 seconds and retry their last request for it to succeed.
The current limits are applied per account:
Plan | Bucket size | Request refill rate | Max keys per request | Total keys |
Free | 25 requests | 5 per minute | 100 | 500 per minute |
Pro | 25 requests | 5 per second | 100 | 500 per second |
Biz | 50 requests | 10 per second | 100 | 1,000 per second |
Enterprise | 500 requests | 50 per second | 100 | 5,000 per second |
More detailed documentation on all purge rate limits can be found in our documentation.
\nWe’ve spent a lot of time optimizing our purge platform. But we’re not done yet. Looking forward, we will continue to enhance the performance of Cloudflare’s single-file purge. The current P50 performance is around 250 ms, and we suspect that we can optimize it further to bring it under 200 ms. We will also build out our ability to allow for greater purge throughput for all of our systems, and will continue to find ways to implement filtering techniques to ensure we can continue to scale effectively and allow customers to purge whatever and whenever they choose.
We invite you to try out our new purge system today and deliver an instant, seamless experience to your visitors.
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Thank you for subscribing!"],"posts.social_buttons.hackernews":[0,"Discuss on Hacker News"],"footer.diversity_equity_inclusion":[0,"Diversity, equity & inclusion"],"footer.critical_infrastructure_defense_project":[0,"Critical Infrastructure Defense Project"]}]}" ssr="" client="load" opts="{"name":"PostCard","value":true}" await-children="">2025-04-01
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