Cold start in

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

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 Object may refer to: General meanings * Object (philosophy), a thing, being, or concept ** Object (abstract), an object which does not exist at any particular time or place ** Physical object, an identifiable collection of matter * Goal, an ...

or populating

cache Cache, caching, or caché may refer to: Places United States * Cache, Idaho, an unincorporated community * Cache, Illinois, an unincorporated community * Cache, Oklahoma, a city in Comanche County * Cache, Utah, Cache County, Utah * Cache County ...

or starting up subsystems. In a typical web service 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

being cleared, and new resources being requested. Other services like a

caching proxy In computer networking, a proxy server is a server application that acts as an intermediary between a client (computing), client requesting a Web resource, resource and the server providing that resource. Instead of connecting directly to a ...

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 ISP servers, on the server ...

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 the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mul ...

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 programmed to Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as C ...

(or

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

). In this case

services Service may refer to: Activities * Administrative service, a required part of the workload of university faculty * Civil service, the body of employees of a government * Community service, volunteer service for the benefit of a community or a p ...

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 c ...

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 co ...

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 systems A recommender system, or a recommendation system (sometimes replacing 'system' with a synonym such as platform or engine), is a subclass of information filtering system that provide suggestions for items that are most pertinent to a particular u ...

. In some

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

scenarios, with models where the training dataset is incrementally added to in time (e.g. in Active learning), 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). {{cite arXiv, last1=Ash , first1= Jordan , last2=Adams , first2=Ryan , title=On Warm-Starting Neural Network Training , eprint=1910.08475 Unlike the previous mentioned instances, cold starting in these scenarios can yield better results of the model.

References

category:Information systems

See also

References