Vercel Sandbox now initializes up to 4x faster outside the Washington, D.C. (iad1) region when reused image data is served from a regional cache.
Initialization now reads cached image data close to where the sandbox runs, avoiding round trips to origin image storage in iad1 on cache hits. Regional caching supports managed and custom images backed by Vercel Container Registry, including snapshots based on those images.
In internal end-to-end benchmarks with Vercel Managed Images, startup time fell about 75% in Paris and from about 3.5s to 1.05s in Seoul. Regions closer to origin storage generally see smaller improvements because requests already travel a shorter distance.
Learn more in the Vercel Sandbox documentation.