As part of maturing the platform we have looked to really focus on our cold starts (and we will continue to do so for the foreseeable future). Cold starts meaning when your project has not had traffic for a little while the Make Live platform scales your GPUs down to zero.

We believe getting cold starts as fast as possible is key to help bring Pixel Streaming to more people with the most cost effective solution to not pay a single cent when no traffic is visiting your project. Not only does it bring a huge cost benefit but it also opens up the possibility of deploying larger and higher fidelity worlds and experiences with consistent and acceptable startup times.

We are happy to release a huge improvement we have made this week using a fairly common concept relatable to lazy loading.

We have found that it cuts start up time in half or more depending on the size of the project once an initial GPU has spun up to serve the first user. Once an initial version of your project has started we cache various parts of the project data aggressively.

Subsequent launches are able to take advantage of the now cached version of your project, resulting in much faster and consistent start up times. Once a new version of your project is uploaded the cache gets invalidated and the cycle repeats.

This is available as standard to all projects at no extra cost, you can check out all of the projects on our community page that now take advantage of this feature.

For example the bakery is one of the larger projects at around 3GB in total size, cold starts now only take approx. 1 minute 30 seconds, previously it would take around 5 minutes.

With the new cache feature in place all projects should be fully running at around the 1 minute 30 second mark after an initial start up.

We are excited to see what you create and share!