Vercel Sandbox with Drives now starts up to 2.4x faster

Vercel says sandboxes that mount Drives are now created faster: the median creation time fell from 1.7 seconds to 0.7 seconds, and the 95th-percentile time fell from 2.2 seconds to 1.6 seconds (Vercel changelog). A Vercel Sandbox is where an agent runs its commands, and a Drive is persistent storage that the sandbox mounts as a working directory when it is created. Files written to a Drive stay after the sandbox stops, so a later sandbox can mount the same Drive and pick up where the last one left off (Vercel documentation; earlier Intel coverage of Drives reaching general availability explains the feature in more detail).

The "up to 2.4x" in the headline matches the median: 1.7 divided by 0.7 is about 2.4, a saving of one second for a typical sandbox. The slower starts improved less. The 95th percentile is the time that only one creation in twenty exceeds, and there the saving was 0.6 seconds, or about 1.4 times faster. A typical sandbox with a Drive now starts in under a second, while the slowest five percent still take more than a second and a half.

Vercel says the speedup applies automatically to every sandbox that uses Drives, without an SDK upgrade or configuration change, and pricing stays the same. The changelog does not say what was changed to make creation faster.