4 ms·

As a side note, Wasmer offers an Edge product that has none of the drawbacks commented when running Python in Cloudflare Workers, providing incredibly fast cold

As a side note, Wasmer offers an Edge product that has none of the drawbacks commented when running Python in Cloudflare Workers, providing incredibly fast cold-start times: https://wasmer.io/templates?language=python https://wasmer.io/templates?language=python

kentonv 3y ago
Wasmer claims to cold start in 50ns. This is obviously impossible: That's 1000x faster than an NVMe read, which is about the fastest cold storage you can get. At least make your claims credible before posting them in competitors' HN threads.
- syrusakbary 3y ago
  > Wasmer claims to cold start in 50ns I believe this statement was based on Wasmer Edge product page, which was mainly measuring instantiation time if the module is already loaded in the Edge Node (which can be assumed true for most common programs such as WinterJS, static-web-server and more). As it seems the 50ns timing was not well understood, we updated our product page to reflect a more accurate timing thanks to your feedback. We can get into sub-millisecond cold starts (loading a module from disk, instantiating it and serving the first request) for the best case scenario, a timing now properly reflected in the Wasmer Edge product page. In any case, and to be clear, we can get into much faster cold starts than the full second than Cloudflare Workers currently offers for Python. Wasmer Edge should be at least 10x faster than Cloudflare Workers for Python cold starts, with a cold-start time of less than <100ms. You can also expect to see much faster cold start times in next releases :)
  - kentonv 3y ago
    > measuring instantiation time if the module is already loaded in the Edge Node (which can be assumed true for most common programs such as WinterJS, static-web-server and more) It sounds like you're saying that your hosting never incurs cold starts in the first place, because you always preload all customers' applications into memory before serving any traffic. That's a fine optimization, if you can fit everything. Cloudflare Workers also preloads the most popular apps before serving traffic -- but we can't load all applications this way since they wouldn't all fit into memory. We only consider it a "cold start" when a request arrives for an application that wasn't preloaded.

kentonv 3y ago

Wasmer claims to cold start in 50ns. This is obviously impossible: That's 1000x faster than an NVMe read, which is about the fastest cold storage you can get. At least make your claims credible before posting them in competitors' HN threads.

syrusakbary 3y ago
> Wasmer claims to cold start in 50ns I believe this statement was based on Wasmer Edge product page, which was mainly measuring instantiation time if the module is already loaded in the Edge Node (which can be assumed true for most common programs such as WinterJS, static-web-server and more). As it seems the 50ns timing was not well understood, we updated our product page to reflect a more accurate timing thanks to your feedback. We can get into sub-millisecond cold starts (loading a module from disk, instantiating it and serving the first request) for the best case scenario, a timing now properly reflected in the Wasmer Edge product page. In any case, and to be clear, we can get into much faster cold starts than the full second than Cloudflare Workers currently offers for Python. Wasmer Edge should be at least 10x faster than Cloudflare Workers for Python cold starts, with a cold-start time of less than <100ms. You can also expect to see much faster cold start times in next releases :)
- kentonv 3y ago
  > measuring instantiation time if the module is already loaded in the Edge Node (which can be assumed true for most common programs such as WinterJS, static-web-server and more) It sounds like you're saying that your hosting never incurs cold starts in the first place, because you always preload all customers' applications into memory before serving any traffic. That's a fine optimization, if you can fit everything. Cloudflare Workers also preloads the most popular apps before serving traffic -- but we can't load all applications this way since they wouldn't all fit into memory. We only consider it a "cold start" when a request arrives for an application that wasn't preloaded.