cold start
A cold start includes initialization work before a new instance can serve its first operation.
Use this when Initial requests are much slower than requests to an already-running instance.
without the term
“Our serverless API takes 4 seconds on the first request after a while, then it's fast. Can you make that first request faster?”
with the term · How do you ask a model for cold start?
Measure this route’s cold start. Remove unnecessary initialization and compare cold and warm latency without sharing user-specific state.
What is cold start?
A new instance, such as a serverless function or a scaled-up container, has to boot and initialize before its first request, so that request is much slower than later ones.
Why does cold start matter when vibe coding?
Initialization can accidentally repeat on every request or load unnecessary resources.
How do you do cold start?
Measure cold and warm paths separately and move only safe reusable initialization into the appropriate lifecycle.
What goes wrong with cold start?
Optimizing a warm benchmark and reporting it as cold-start improvement.