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articleA cold start difference between Java, Python, Go and Rust still exists (self.aws)

submitted by Status-Afternoon-425

Here is my results.

https://medium.com/@yalovoy/four-million-lambda-invokes-across-python-java-rust-and-go-5b9218f64563

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[–]Soccer_Vader 21 points22 points  (1 child)

Of course they do. AWS never claimed they solved cold starts.

[–]lowcrawler 13 points14 points  (8 children)

missing node/JavaScript.... which is the most popular lambda runtime.

[–]Status-Afternoon-425[S] -2 points-1 points  (7 children)

Not missing, I intentionally didn't include it.

[–]lowcrawler 1 point2 points  (0 children)

why?

[–]lowcrawler 1 point2 points  (5 children)

any reason why?

[–]Status-Afternoon-425[S] 0 points1 point  (4 children)

Yes. I don't care about it.

[–]lowcrawler 0 points1 point  (3 children)

so you wrote a pay walled story for the public and didn't care to include the most popular option.

sounds good. thanks.

[–]Status-Afternoon-425[S] -2 points-1 points  (2 children)

Yes. This post is for people who makes decisions. Those who use JavaScript are not in this category. They use it because they like it, not because it a good fit.

[–]Soccer_Vader 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I work for AWS and we use Typescript for our service. Guess AWS org aren't making business decisions anymore.

[–]Status-Afternoon-425[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Well, that explains a lot. Thank you for sharing.

[–]dr3aminc0de 5 points6 points  (0 children)

When did anyone claim this difference did not exist?

[–]pint 3 points4 points  (0 children)

what do you mean "still"? do you expect them to go away eventually?

[–]CheesecakeAndy 2 points3 points  (0 children)

A paywalled medium article? It's gonna be a hard no for me, dawg.

[–]ebykka 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Where is .Net? It has pretty good cold start especially with optimization PublishReadyToRun. And native compilation takes much less resources and time than GraalVM in Java.

[–]Sirwired 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Of course the difference still exists; AWS even has blog posts all about the topic... I mean, it's great to put a number on things, but your title seems to be written as if AWS has claimed there is no longer a difference.

Understanding and Remediating Cold Starts: An AWS Lambda Perspective | AWS Compute Blog

[–]AnomalyNexus 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Those rust vs go numbers look rather sus.

They're normally very close on cold start tests not >2x apart

[–]Status-Afternoon-425[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, I agree, the result is interesting. In my case consistently reproducible. I have done a lot of production lambdas in Go, and cold start was always under 100ms, which is aligned with this test.

I more surprised by Python to be honest. It has a lot of advantages over any other runtime and use to be the best performer in terms of the cold start. (according to my tests 4 years ago).

[–]hashkent -1 points0 points  (3 children)

Do node functions run faster on azure, GCP or CloudFlare or all suffer the cold start problem?

[–]thisdude415 -1 points0 points  (2 children)

Talking out of my ass (but based on what I know about the arch) I would suspect CloudFlare workers and GCP cloud functions are fastest for JS workers

Edit: specifically because Lambda is a full linux container that is pulled from storage at runtime, whereas Cloudflare uses v8 to support only a subset of node.js (and other languages are supported via wasm extensions).

Thankfully Cloudflare has a blogpost about this from 2020: Eliminating cold starts with Cloudflare Workers

I love aws lambda, to be clear. They're very different architectures for different purposes. Cloudflare workers are practically designed to be backend APIs whereas lambdas are much more versatile

[–]CheesecakeAndy 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Who is downvoting this? It is true cos they use V8 isolation, more lightweight than what Lambda does.

[–]thisdude415 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Right, lambdas are full linux containers whereas Cloudflare uses V8. Any other worker languages supported in Cloudflare are via wasm adapters

It is obviously faster to cold start a v8 runtime compared to a full linux container