# Scale to one: How Fluid solves cold starts By Steven Van · 2025-09-18 Vercel says Fluid compute now prevents cold starts on 99.37% of requests and softens the ones that still occur. Vercel says [Vercel]()'s Fluid compute now avoids cold starts on **99.37%** of all requests, and that the rare ones which still happen are shorter and faster than on a typical serverless platform. The [original Fluid compute announcement]() lays out how this works, from four angles: - **Prevention**: a scale-to-one model keeps an instance warm before it's needed, instead of shutting it down after a few idle minutes. - **Frequency reduction**: Fluid reuses existing instances to serve multiple requests rather than spinning up a new one each time. - **Anticipation**: predictive scaling warms instances ahead of expected demand. - **Impact reduction**: when a cold start does happen, a Rust-based runtime with Node.js and Python support speeds up initialization, and bytecode caching pre-compiles function code to cut startup overhead. ![Fluid compute allows for more efficient compute usage than traditional serverless]() Fluid compute allows for more efficient compute usage than traditional serverless ![Vercel]() Vercel The platform for frontend developers — deploy, preview, and scale web apps and AI agents with zero config. [View Vercel →]() [Original source]() [Read Scale to one: How Fluid solves cold starts on Creators Toolbox]() --- Canonical source: https://creatorstoolbox.com/blog/vercel-scale-to-one-how-fluid-solves-cold-starts