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Comment by zackbloom | Hacker News Reader

35MB is what Amazon reports and bills you based on. If that number is wrong, a great question is what are they charging people for?

Launching a process is different than launching a language runtime or interpreter. They generally are not optimized for initial start time in the way an Isolate is. The duration of a context switch varies, but when dealing with tens of thousands of requests per second per machine they are very significant.

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Using billing to measure the size or space of something is the worst kind of measure. For example, I recently got on a Grey Hound with my bicycle, packaged in a box. My ticket was $27, but the bike cost $30, even though I weight 3 to 4 times what my bike does. Humans also need thousands of liters of space, while the bicycle box only took up 200 liter or so. And the time the bus driver took to load the bicycle is negligible.

AWS uses virtualization domains to separate customer workloads, and Meltdown required that they all be HVM to provide strong guarantees: https://lists.xenproject.org/archives/html/xen-devel/2018-01...

Your account's Lambda functions won't share a kernel with anyone else's

I'm not sure why you think process start-up is such a heavyweight operation. Of course there's lots of optimization for start-up, it's the whole basis for Unix.

A context switch is O(10000) cycles and 10k is totally doable.

I agree that the Isolate architecture is more efficient, I just object to the straw man comparison. (And would love some real data.)

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