Show HN: Sub-millisecond VM sandboxes using CoW memory forking (github.com)

A new development announced by Zeroboot presents sub-millisecond virtual machine (VM) sandboxes for AI agents, utilizing copy-on-write (CoW) forking techniques to enhance performance. This innovation allows for an impressive spawn latency of just 0.79 milliseconds at the 50th percentile (p50) and 1.74 milliseconds at the 99th percentile (p99), significantly outperforming existing solutions like E2B and Daytona, which range between 150 to 400 milliseconds. The memory footprint for each sandbox is minimal, around 265KB, demonstrating a substantial improvement in efficiency while maintaining hardware-enforced memory isolation typical of KVM VMs. This advancement is significant for the AI/ML community as it enables rapid deployment of isolated environments for running AI code, which is crucial for applications requiring high concurrency and minimal latency. The technical underpinning involves using Firecracker snapshots to boot a VM, pre-load execution contexts, and then leverage CoW for quick state restoration during fork operations. While the framework is currently a working prototype and not yet ready for production use, its implications for increased throughput in AI-driven workloads could revolutionize how services handle computational tasks, especially in edge computing scenarios where resource constraints are prevalent.