Rethinking Process Snapshots for Near-Warm Serverless Cold Starts

Serverless computing promises effortless resource elasticity, yet this vision remains fundamentally limited by cold-start delays. Despite years of optimization, many function invocations still incur delays of tens to hundreds of milliseconds, often exceeding the function’s actual execution time. Existing systems attempt to avoid redundant initialization by snapshotting functions after startup and restoring them on demand, but they still struggle to deliver consistently low-latency startup from disk.

We show that these limitations stem from a lack of OS support for snapshot restoration. Current memory primitives, tailored for incremental process startup, force a trade-off between efficient on-disk layout and cheap virtual address space reconstruction. Furthermore, the kernel lacks a bulk-restore mechanism for process metadata, forcing expensive, fine-grained reconstruction from userspace.

To address this, we introduce the Snapshot Hybrid ELF (SHELF) format and a co-designed kernel primitive, the spliceVMA, which decouple a snapshot’s physical layout on storage from the process’s virtual-memory layout. This enables the efficient overlay of sparse and reordered pages, reliable prefetching, and the elimination of unnecessary I/O, copies, and faults. In parallel, we build an efficient process-metadata restore path that reconstructs process state in bulk rather than using a large number of system calls from userspace.

We implement these mechanisms in Spice, restoring and running functions from disk within 0.6–18ms of warm-invocation latency (compared to 3.6–1197ms in existing systems). For representative Java, Python, and Node.js functions, Spice reduces end-to-end latency by 7.5× and 9.5× on average over state-of-the-art process- and VM-based systems, respectively.