Top all-time · #3152
Mikhail Shilkov
Personal blog · mikhail.ioprogrammingsystems
Mikhail Shilkov's personal blog at mikhail.io covers programming and systems. Since 2016, 23 different Hacker News readers have linked it 30 times, most often “InfiniCache: Distributed Cache on Top of AWS Lambda (Paper Review)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-10-28, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Mikhail Shilkov's posts for measured analysis of serverless performance, mainly AWS Lambda cold starts across languages and runtimes, plus Lambda pricing and cost trade-offs.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Serverless, Cloud, Azure, AWS, F#, Functional Programming, and more
Most-linked posts?
- InfiniCache: Distributed Cache on Top of AWS Lambda (Paper Review)6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-03-10
- AWS Lambda cold start during per language (2021)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-09-23
- Cold Starts in AWS Lambda3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-08-21
- Claude Code uses WebFetch vs. WebSearch (observations, schemas, prompts)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-10-06
- Serverless: Cold Start War2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-09-10
What Hacker News says?
...and the language choice has a measurable impact on the cold start time. I've measured it - as have others[1][2]. You're right that it's not just about the language runtime though. I must admit I'd forgotten about the container spin up et al as well (thankfully the recent ENI fix for VPC lambda's has been released because that was threatening to bite us hard on one project). [1] https://mikhail.io/serverless/colds…
Comment linking /serverless/coldstarts/aws/languages/
on “Serverless: slower and more expensive”Submitted Serverless: Cold Start War as a story · 278 points
HN discussion> You're mixing arguments here. It's not the occasional 5-second long request, it's "the app doesn't start serving requests for 5 seconds". Lambdas cold-start during requests. So the unlucky request that triggers a cold start eats that cold start. > Using data science tooling in a lambda seems iffy, especially ones that are not production ready. Nonsense, there are a lot of lambdas that just load, transform, and sho…
Comment linking /serverless/coldstarts/aws/
on “AWS Lambda pricing now per ms”Submitted InfiniCache: Distributed Cache on Top of AWS Lambda (Paper Review) as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI found this to be the best update on the cold start problem. https://mikhail.io/2018/08/serverless-cold-start-war/
Comment linking /2018/08/serverless-cold-start-war/
on “New for AWS Lambda: Use Any Programming Language and Share Common Components”Submitted Comparing Scala to F# as a story · 4 points
HN discussionFirst, caching. Can be done via API Gateway or Cloudfront. Second, minimizing the function's code size. Both by making small functions and then optimizing them (there are plugins for the serverless framework to do that) Third, using a language with a minimized cold start. Some can have cold start latences lower than 1 second [^1] [1]: https://mikhail.io/serverless/coldstarts/aws/
Comment linking /serverless/coldstarts/aws/
on “Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?”Submitted A practical approach to Temporal architecture as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThere are some, e.g. https://github.com/jeremydaly/lambda-warmer and my post https://mikhail.io/2018/08/aws-lambda-warmer-as-pulumi-compo...
Comment linking /2018/08/aws-lambda-warmer-as-pulumi-component/
on “Serverless: Cold Start War”Submitted InfiniCache: Distributed Cache on Top of AWS Lambda (Paper Review) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionTwo things. 1- It's amazing that Java has the fastest cold start time! Faster than Nodejs.[1] That's exactly the opposite of what I've heard before. 2- I am so tired of hearing about cold start times for dormant apps as if that is the only cold start scenario. It is arguably a worse problem to have cold starts when scaling! What do I mean by cold starts when scaling? You adopt serverless. Things go great. Your app i…
Comment linking /2018/08/serverless-cold-start-war//coldstart-dependencies.png
on “Serverless: Cold Start War”Submitted Claude Code's Web Tools: WebFetch vs. WebSearch as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt has always had much slower cold start times than other choices: https://mikhail.io/serverless/coldstarts/aws/
Comment linking /serverless/coldstarts/aws/
on “AWS Lambda adds supports for .NET 6”Submitted Claude Code uses WebFetch vs. WebSearch (observations, schemas, prompts) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionAbstract Algebra makes it way into code sometimes... https://mikhail.io/2018/07/monads-explained-in-csharp-again/
Comment linking /2018/07/monads-explained-in-csharp-again/
on “Skills Poor Programmers Lack”Submitted AWS Lambda cold start during per language (2021) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionMy experience has been the opposite, with simple python docker containers showing noticeably slower cold starts than python zips. I've also found the size of the zip package matters (smaller is faster). However things change over time, maybe there have been recent improvements? Specifically regarding cold starts of lambda instances, I recall this excellent article from Jan 2021 which measures cold start latencies fo…
Comment linking /serverless/coldstarts/aws/languages/
on “Running Containers on AWS Lambda”Submitted Temporal: Open-Source Workflows as Code as a story · 2 points
HN discussionVery important caveats from the paper review at https://mikhail.io/2020/03/infinicache-distributed-cache-on-... : > Mind that the workload was selected to be a good match for InfiniCache properties (large objects with infrequent access). > The hourly cost increases monotonically with the access rate, and eventually overshoots ElastiCache when the access rate exceeds 312 K requests per hour (86 requests per second).…
Comment linking /2020/03/infinicache-distributed-cache-on-aws-lambda/
on “InfiniCache: In-memory cache that is built atop ephemeral serverless functions”Submitted Infinicache distributed cache on AWS Lambda as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI’ll just leave this with you. 0.1 difference may not seem like a lot until you start hitting 100M invocations. https://mikhail.io/serverless/coldstarts/aws/languages/
Comment linking /serverless/coldstarts/aws/languages/
on “Java 21 makes me like Java again”Submitted Cold Starts in AWS Lambda as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Tic-Tac-Toe with F#, Azure Functions, HATEOAS and Property-Based Testing as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Eliminate Cold Starts by Predicting Invocations of Serverless Functions as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted InfiniCache: Distributed Cache on Top of AWS Lambda (Paper Review) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted InfiniCache: Distributed Cache on Top of AWS Lambda as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Santa brings cloud to every developer as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Programmable Cloud: Provisioning Azure App Service with Pulumi – Mikhail Shilkov as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Monads explained in C# – Mikhail Shilkov as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
