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You mentioned that Cloud Run allowed you to reserve a number of always-running instances, but that feature is available for Cloud Functions as well [0].

[0] https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/configuring/min-inst...

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Hi! Author here.

Functions still only run a single request at a time, while Cloud Run can run as many as the container can handle. We want to build for multiple smaller requests, so when we get ~10k requests incoming in a short timespan it's a lot more useful to have Cloud Run.

I may be mistaken, but I believe cold start is roughly the same for both.

Obviously switching away from Cloud Functions does away with the architectural limitation of processing requests serially, but from my (limited) understanding of Node.js internals, Express applications are single-threaded anyway.

Do you have any idea of where your performance gains are coming from? Is there a lot of async, non-blocking waiting happening in the process of fulfilling requests against your API?

The NodeJS application is single-threaded, but the Node EventLoop can handle a huge amount of parallel requests, especially since most of the time per request is spent waiting for calls to the DB or external APIs.

I believe the majority of our performance gain is from having far fewer cold starts during large traffic loads.

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