Cold Start Issue in NextJS application

[vjjcn]

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Amplify Hosting feature

Deployments, Frontend builds

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe:

Hello Community,

Lot of users in amplify are facing the issue in which the website takes more than 3-4 seconds to load because of the cold start, It makes UI experience of the application bad, some users might drop of the website because of the cold start.

Describe how you'd like this feature to work

I request you to improve the coldstart of the website which typically takes 3-4 seconds and make the UI experience of the Amplify better.

[github-actions]

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[mauerbac]

Can you provide more info about your app? Like versions and provide a screencapture?

[kachkaev]

Same issue here. Cold start takes more than five seconds. To me as a user, it feels forever. Just tried opening our team’s app on Monday morning and it took 7.08 seconds. It’s a B2B SaaS with low traffic so the probability of hitting cold instance is quite high.

Our stack:

• Amplify Gen 1
• Node 20 (latest available - see gen 1: Support Node.js v22 #3978)
• Next.js 15.1 (latest) with pages router
• _app.js essentially contains only <Autenticator> (from @aws-amplify/[email protected]), the rest is client-rendered

I was thinking of running a cron job in CI that would fetch from Amplify once in 5-10 minutes. This might keep the app warm during business hours to avoid cold starts. But this is a pretty hacky solution to something that should work out of the box anyway. Not sure if constant artificial pre-warming would affect our bill. I hope to see some official guidance in Amplify docs.

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UPD: tried opening a client-facing instance of our Amplify app (deployed from a different branch to a different domain). It took 14.84 seconds to make a cold request to /. Total time to login screen was over 16 seconds!

When refreshed (even without browser cache), loading is quite fast. Getting to the same <Autenticator> screen in under a second when Amplify is warm. I am in the same region, so makes sense. The initial request to / was only 137ms (100+ times faster than the cold one!).

I can reliably reproduce the above delay if nobody is visiting the website for more than 5-10 mins. It’s not a one-off thing.