Yandex open-sources YaFF, a technology that reduce server CPU usage by up to 20%

NEW YORK, June 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Yandex has open-sourced YaFF (Yet Another Flat Format), a new technology for efficient data transmission and processing in high-load services. YaFF allows applications to access data without deserialization, helping reduce server CPU usage by up to 20%. For large-scale digital platforms, infrastructure savings can amount to hundreds of millions of dollars annually. The release makes a technology already deployed in Yandex services available to the broader developer community.

Modern digital services continuously exchange large volumes of data between applications, servers, and storage systems. One of the most widely used technologies for this is Protobuf. While efficient for transmitting data, Protobuf requires applications to deserialize data before it can be used. In large-scale systems, that step can consume up to 10% of available CPU resources. Alternatives such as FlatBuffers eliminate this overhead, but often require extensive code changes and migration efforts.

YaFF (Yet Another Flat Format) was developed at Yandex internally to address this trade-off. For teams building high-load backend systems, Protobuf deserialization can become a significant infrastructure cost. YaFF works alongside standard Protobuf infrastructure, allowing applications to access data directly while preserving existing schemas, APIs, and development workflows.

This approach allows organizations to improve infrastructure efficiency without costly rewrites or large-scale migrations. The impact can be especially significant in data-intensive services such as search, advertising, and recommendation systems, where small reductions in CPU usage can free up substantial computing capacity.

YaFF is already used in Yandex's advertising platform, which handles hundreds of thousands of requests per second. In this production environment, the technology reduced CPU load by 10–20%, helping the company increase capacity while avoiding additional infrastructure costs. YaFF is now available on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 open-source license, with code and documentation for developers interested in testing or contributing to the project as Yandex continues to expand YaFF's capabilities for large-scale backend systems. 

YaFF expands Yandex's portfolio of open-source infrastructure technologies developed for large-scale production environments. The company's open-source projects include Perforator, a continuous profiling system for data centers; YDB, a distributed SQL database; YTsaurus, a distributed data storage and processing platform; SPQR, a PostgreSQL sharding system; and userver, a framework for high-load applications.

About Yandex

Yandex is a global technology company that builds intelligent products and services powered by machine learning. Its goal is to help consumers and businesses better navigate the online and offline world. Since 1997, Yandex has delivered world-class, locally relevant search and information services and developed market-leading on-demand transportation services, navigation products, and other mobile applications for millions of consumers worldwide.

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