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Comment by stefan_lec | Hacker News Reader

How do these perform for cold-starts? I remember one of the disadvantages of using web assembly for Workers was more spin-up time, but maybe they figured out a way around that.

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We’ve got some cold start numbers in our previous blog post: https://blog.cloudflare.com/python-workers-advancements/.

There is still more to do here and it’s what we will be focusing on next.

Thanks, we've been using firecracker VMs with AWS MicroVM[1] and Fly.io Sprites[1] but interested in using Workers instead

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48642510

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46557825

The cold start numbers on that blog post show that its faster than AWS Lambda but your linked benchmark page [1] shows that Lambda is not only much faster but also much more consistent.

[1] https://cold.picheta.me/#bare

It looks like that link is incorrect, it should be pointing at https://cold.picheta.me/#packages.

My experience with Rust Wasm workers was that they eventually had shorter cold-start and runtime than JavaScript ones because your wasm is significantly more optimized than a JavaScript one that loads whatever packages/dependencies into its memory.

In many cases, the cold-start time might not be visible to users. E.g. if you serve your static content from a CDN, maybe you have stale content in local storage you can show while fetching updated data. If it all happens on a sub-100ms timescale, it should feel quite instant?

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