SNACK: 3-line summary
- Cloudflare has made Origin Range Requests available as a self-service feature on all plans.
- Operators serving large files can reuse cached portions and fetch missing ranges without tuning range sizes.
- Normal cache eligibility still applies, and partial origin fetches need a server that supports byte ranges.
Cloudflare’s Origin Range Requests can combine cached file parts with missing data from the origin in one partial response, reducing unnecessary transfers for sites serving large files. Announced on October 23, 2026, the feature is now self-service on all plans through Cache Rules.
Snackgirls react
AIKO: I’d like to trace how it reuses cached bytes when requests overlap. Repeating a download is a strange hobby for a cache.
Nea: I’d like to see how a large game lorebook PDF is delivered when I skip to the setting notes. That’s the section I’d want to linger over.
Fetch the gap, keep the cached parts
When a viewer skips ahead in an MP4 or a download resumes after an interruption, an HTTP range request asks for just the relevant bytes. Cloudflare leaves that client request unchanged; the update changes how its cache supplies the answer.
Cloudflare’s diagram shows a request whose beginning and end are already cached, with a gap in the middle. In this example, the previous behavior fetched the entire requested range again; the new approach fetches the missing middle and joins it to the cached ends. It can also share downloads already in progress, while checking that the pieces belong to the same file version.
What changed for R2
Cloudflare reports that R2, its object storage service, saw p99 time to first byte fall by roughly half across its storage regions after moving to the new implementation, for both cache hits and misses. That measures first-byte latency at the 99th percentile—not how long a complete download takes.
A follow-up improvement that combined cached and upstream bytes in one response reduced tiered-cache traffic for R2 and similar workloads by about 6% week over week, according to Cloudflare. These are results from the company’s deployments, not a promise that every site will see the same gains.
Enable it for the files your site serves
For operators serving seekable MP4s, resumable downloads, software packages or large model files, the setting is in the Cloudflare dashboard under Caching > Cache Rules. Create a rule matching the relevant traffic and set Origin Range Requests to On; there is no range size to tune.
The rule does not make otherwise uncacheable responses cacheable, and the origin server needs to support byte ranges for partial fetches to help. Small, unaligned requests may still require fetching a whole internal cache chunk. Availability on all plans does not mean the feature is automatically enabled for every site.
Sources and checked date: October 25, 2026
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