← recall

cold start term

first-request slowness before warm-up (JIT, cache, container)

JVMs JIT-compile hot paths, caches need to be populated, serverless containers need to spin up. Cold start latency is fundamentally different from steady-state latency.

aliases: warm up, first-hit slow

topics: latency, performance

references:

• AWS — Lambda cold starts
• Mikhail Shilkov — cold start benchmarks