What is cold start?

Cold start in agent sandboxes

Cold start matters because agents often create a sandbox per task or per conversation, and every second of startup is latency the user feels. Providers reduce it with pre-warmed pools, snapshot restore and small base images.

Published cold-start numbers are vendor claims measured under the vendor’s own conditions (region, image size, warm pools). Treat them as directional and measure with your own image and region before deciding. We label all such figures as vendor claims.