What are Cold Starts and Warm Starts, and Why Do They Matter for Performance?

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What are Cold Starts and Warm Starts, and Why Do They Matter for Performance?

Cold start refers to starting up a system, application, or function from scratch with no pre-existing state (incurring full initialization overhead), whereas a warm start means restarting or reusing a system that’s already initialized or cached, resulting in much faster startup and response times.

These concepts matter for performance because cold starts typically introduce extra latency and slowdowns, while warm starts leverage cached resources to deliver quick, efficient responses.

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