Cold start in

computing Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computer, computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and the development of both computer hardware, hardware and softw ...

refers to a problem where a system or its part was created or restarted and is not working at its normal operation. The problem can be related to initialising internal objects or populating cache or starting up subsystems. In a typical

web service A web service (WS) is either: * a service offered by an electronic device to another electronic device, communicating with each other via the Internet, or * a server running on a computer device, listening for requests at a particular port over a n ...

system the problem occurs after restarting the server, and also when clearing the cache (e.g., after releasing new version). The first requests to the web service will cause significantly more load due to the server cache being populated, the browser cache being cleared, and new resources being requested. Other services like a caching proxy or

web accelerator A web accelerator is a proxy server that reduces website access time. They can be a self-contained hardware appliance or installable software. Web accelerators may be installed on the client computer or mobile device, on Internet service provider ...

will also need time to gather new resources and operate normally. Similar problem occurs when creating instances in a hosted environment and instances in

cloud computing Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...

services. Cold start (or cold boot) may also refer to a booting process of a single

computer A computer is a machine that can be Computer programming, programmed to automatically Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (''computation''). Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic set ...

(or

virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization or emulator, emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide the functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve ...

). In this case services and other startup

applications Application may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Application software, computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks ** Application layer, an abstraction layer that specifies protocols and interface methods used in a ...

are executed after reboot. The system is typically made available to the user even though startup operations are still performed and slow down other operations. Another type of problem is when the

data model A data model is an abstract model that organizes elements of data and standardizes how they relate to one another and to the properties of real-world entities. For instance, a data model may specify that the data element representing a car be ...

of a particular system requires connections between objects. In that case new objects will not operate normally until those connections are made. This is well known problem with

recommender system A recommender system (RecSys), or a recommendation system (sometimes replacing ''system'' with terms such as ''platform'', ''engine'', or ''algorithm'') and sometimes only called "the algorithm" or "algorithm", is a subclass of information fi ...

s. In some

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

scenarios, with models where the training dataset is incrementally added to in time (e.g. in

active learning Active learning is "a method of learning in which students are actively or experientially involved in the learning process and where there are different levels of active learning, depending on student involvement." states that "students particip ...

), cold start refers to training the model on the so far obtained labeled pool with new data added de novo, instead of training the model on new data with all its knowledge from previous trainings (warm start). Unlike the previous mentioned instances, cold starting in these scenarios can yield better results of the model.

References

Information systems

See also

References