January 10, 2026
Ice Ice GPU: speed vs sandbox
GPU memory snapshots: sub-second startup (2025)
Modal freezes GPUs for instant apps—fans cheer, skeptics side‑eye gVisor
TLDR: Modal now snapshots GPU memory so AI apps start almost instantly, skipping warm‑ups and recompiles. The community loves the speed, but argues over gVisor’s overhead and whether lighter alternatives like Firecracker would preserve the gains, with one tester noting a quirky first‑request redirect.
Modal just dropped a crowd‑pleaser: GPU memory snapshots that let AI apps “wake up” in under a second by freezing the graphics card’s state and restoring it instantly. Translation: your model doesn’t need a warm‑up lap; it pops out of cryo‑sleep already compiled and ready to sprint. Cue the applause—one fan simply said, “Looks great,” while others imagined “AI models in stasis pods.”
But the party has drama. The early tester who saw a “303 on first curl” turned it into a mini‑meme: “first request gets lost, second finds the VIP entrance.” Meanwhile, the big debate: speed vs. sandbox. Multiple commenters zeroed in on Modal’s use of gVisor (a security layer for containers) and called it “notoriously high overhead.” One asked if Modal runs everything in gVisor and suggested Firecracker (a lighter virtual machine) might be better. Another pressed for alternatives if you trust your containers.
The tech behind the hype? NVIDIA’s new checkpoint tools let Modal clone the GPU’s memory after it’s fully warmed up. So things like torch.compile (code optimization for GPUs) don’t have to run again. The crowd loves the idea of skipping the “make coffee while your model loads” phase, but the comments are split: Team Speed shouting “instant boot FTW!” versus Team Overhead warning the sandbox tax might eat your gains. Peak startup drama—and highly clickable.
Key Points
- •Modal introduced GPU memory snapshots, extending its earlier memory snapshots to include GPU state for faster cold starts.
- •Previously, GPU state had to be recreated post-restore, requiring CPU-to-GPU weight transfers and avoiding pre-snapshot CUDA interactions.
- •GPU memory snapshots copy GPU memory after operations, restoring compiled models, CUDA kernels, and captured CUDA graphs without reinitialization.
- •NVIDIA’s CUDA checkpoint/restore API (drivers 570/575) enables transparent checkpoint and restore of GPU memory for many workloads.
- •Modal’s distributed file system caches common files, improving cold boot performance by 3–5x versus uncached downloads.