Meta has deployed ZGateway, a stateless proxy layer designed to manage traffic for its ZippyDB database system. The new architecture addresses previous scaling issues where direct connections between clients and database hosts led to excessive resource consumption, including high memory and CPU usage, as well as file descriptor exhaustion.
The proxy tier currently processes over 1 billion operations per second, accounting for approximately 40% of all ZippyDB traffic. Meta projects this share will increase to 60% in the future, while maintaining a computational overhead of roughly 6% for typical use cases.
ZGateway operates as a managed service within regional tiers discovered via Meta’s ServiceRouter. It functions in two modes: as a pure proxy or as a read-through cache. The system utilizes Meta’s existing C++ ZippyDB client engine to handle request routing, TLS termination, and authorization.
By implementing this proxy layer, Meta reports a significant reduction in network complexity. Modeling suggests that persistent connections across the fleet can decrease by approximately 19 times, while per-host connection counts may drop by 97% to 98%, effectively decoupling connection scaling from the total number of clients.
