Vercel Sandbox with Drives starts up to 2.4x faster

Vercel reports that the median time to create a Sandbox with Drives dropped from 1.7 seconds to 0.7 seconds. The 95th percentile figure fell from 2.2 seconds to 1.6 seconds. The comparison covers a Sandbox with Drives created from a Vercel image, measured before and after the update.

The speedup needs no action from developers. It applies automatically to every sandbox that uses Drives, so existing code does not need an SDK upgrade or configuration changes. Pricing stays the same.

Vercel documents Drives in its Drives documentation, linked from the changelog entry. The changelog credits Valerian Roche and Ben Sabic as contributors.

Agents that start a fresh sandbox for each task should see shorter waits before their code runs, without changing their setup. The median gain is larger than the p95 gain, so slow outlier starts will still take noticeably longer than typical ones.

Teams that budget for sandbox startup time can reduce that allowance for Drives-backed workloads at the same cost.