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Yeah, and memory is infinite, and all disks are free, and the computing fairies make all the processors super fast. But back in the real world, startup time is a valid concern.



Don't know your "real" world. In my real world, the AWS instance takes several minutes to come up - I can spare some milliseconds on thr JVM startup.


In my real world the containers we spin up come up in seconds, but container restart is far more rare than restarting services.


If the time to restart your process or host affects the overall operation and performance of your service you're doing it wrong.


If your services consistently restart quickly, it gives you the freedom to design things differently.

E.g. doing a rolling update across a large number of instances by restarting a service at a time can become a quick enough process to be viable in instances where you'd otherwise need lots of excess capacity to be able to cycle larger proportions of instances at the same time. Making full rolling updates "cheaper" both in time and resources also translates to making rapid updates a safer choice (e.g. if I can roll back a broken release in 5 minutes, it's far safer to push out a new release than if a rollback takes hours).


That just means you expect restarting to be slow and have excluded it from your system design.

There is no problem with restarting nginx to update its config once a second, and it's even encouraged that you do so. Besides, crash-only software recovery is really the only morally sound development technique.


What are you doing that you frequently starts / shuts down an application to the order where 70ms is a problem?


Not just frequently starting/stopping applications but a persistence engine at that.


How many reboots per second are you having to endure? Maybe you should make your server process crash less often.




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