Vercel Sandbox starts up to 4x faster
Vercel Sandbox speeds up initialization by up to four times outside Washington, D.C. by serving reused image data from regional caches instead of the origin storage.
Vercel Sandbox now initializes up to four times faster outside the Washington, D.C. (iad1) region when reused image data is served from a regional cache. The update reads cached image data near the sandbox’s location, reducing round trips to the origin storage in iad1 on cache hits. This feature supports both managed and custom images stored in Vercel Container Registry, including snapshots derived from those images.
Internal end-to-end benchmarks using Vercel Managed Images showed startup time reductions of about 75% in Paris and from roughly 3.5 seconds to 1.05 seconds in Seoul. The improvements vary by region, with smaller gains in areas closer to the origin storage due to shorter travel distances for requests.
Regional caching for Sandbox images is now available globally outside iad1, enabling faster initialization for workloads that reuse the same images across multiple deployments. The feature applies to both Vercel-hosted and custom images backed by the Vercel Container Registry.
The change targets workloads that frequently reuse images, such as development environments or CI/CD pipelines, where repeated initialization delays can accumulate. Vercel did not disclose specific performance metrics for regions other than Paris and Seoul in the announcement.