This article discusses an unexpected solution to sporadic latency spikes experienced by Cloudflare's edge stack. The author explains that disabling keepalives between SSL and FL (two parts of their edge stack) improved the 99.9th latency percentile by 4x. Although generally beneficial, in this specific case, the local connection establishment was faster than the delay caused by landing on a busy worker. This solution allowed Cloudflare to run their machines hotter without seeing increased latency, reducing their overall footprint.