Vercel Sandbox snapshot creation is now up to 10x faster

Vercel Sandbox now creates snapshots up to 10x faster. Vercel says median time to snapshot is under 0.4 seconds, down from 4.4 seconds, and restore time at p50 has dropped 50%, from 500ms to 250ms.

The speedup comes from a change to the Vercel Hive Snapshot (VHS) format. Snapshots can now write and restore by reusing frames, and VHS indexes data more efficiently, so more reads and writes run in parallel. Restores can also load more of the sandbox base image alongside your data at the same time.

This matters most for persistent sandboxes, which are the default. They snapshot automatically when a session stops and resume from the latest snapshot. Nothing needs configuring, but only new snapshots get the faster format. Existing snapshots keep the previous one.