Cold Start
A cold start is the short delay a request experiences when it’s the one that wakes an app back up after that app has scaled to zero. Because the app has no running replicas while idle, the first request in has to wait for a replica to start before it can be served.
When min replicas is set to 0 and an app has had no traffic for a while, Ownkube removes its running replicas entirely, so the app costs nothing while idle. The next request that arrives triggers a replica to start, and that request waits briefly while the replica comes up, then is served normally. Every request after that is served instantly, the same as always-on traffic, until the app scales back to zero from inactivity again. Keep min replicas at 1 or higher for anything that must answer instantly and can’t tolerate the wake delay.
Cold start is the trade-off you accept in exchange for paying nothing while an app is idle. For low-traffic or personal apps, an occasional wake delay is reasonable in exchange for not billing at all between visits. For latency-sensitive production traffic, keeping at least one replica warm avoids the delay entirely, at the cost of some steady working-set memory billing.