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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.

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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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