{"type":"post","id":"sandbox-resourcing-burst-don-t-reserve-992ab0","slug":"sandbox-resourcing-burst-don-t-reserve-992ab0","title":"Sandbox resourcing: burst, don't reserve","description":"Modal says a typical Sandbox spends more than half its lifetime using less than 6% of peak CPU because agent sessions alternate between model waits and brief compute-heavy actions.","retrieval_nugget":"Modal says a typical Sandbox spends more than half its lifetime using less than 6% of peak CPU because agent sessions alternate between model waits and brief compute-heavy actions. For teams building coding agents, the signal is to measure execution by phase: peak provisioning may leave capacity idle, although Modal does not report savings from a different allocation policy.","published_at":"2026-11-13","updated_at":"2026-11-13","record_date":"2026-11-13","date_kind":"published_at","topics":["sandbox"],"entities":["Modal","Modal Sandboxes","Terminal-Bench"],"related_patterns":[],"novelty_label":"new_angle","what_changed":"It argues that agent sandboxes should burst CPU capacity on demand rather than reserve peak resources, citing prolonged idle periods between brief compute-heavy tasks.","prior_refs":[],"source_url":"https://modal.com/blog/sandbox-bursting","source_urls":["https://modal.com/blog/sandbox-bursting"],"schema_version":"newruntime-agent-readable-v0.2","stable_id":"post:sandbox-resourcing-burst-don-t-reserve-992ab0","status":"published","visuals":[],"editor":{"role":"editor","name":"Andrey Reshetnikov","profile":"https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.md","profile_json":"https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.json","same_as":["https://www.linkedin.com/in/reshetnikov1/","https://t.me/lapetuse"]},"routes":{"html":"https://newruntime.com/posts/sandbox-resourcing-burst-don-t-reserve-992ab0/","markdown":"https://newruntime.com/posts/sandbox-resourcing-burst-don-t-reserve-992ab0.md","json":"https://newruntime.com/posts/sandbox-resourcing-burst-don-t-reserve-992ab0.json"},"markdown_url":"https://newruntime.com/posts/sandbox-resourcing-burst-don-t-reserve-992ab0.md","next_reads":[{"type":"topic","path":"/topics/sandbox/","url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/sandbox/","title":"Sandbox","reason":"Explore the sandbox topic hub.","media_type":"text/html","markdown_url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/sandbox.md","json_url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/sandbox.json"},{"type":"collection","path":"/posts/","url":"https://newruntime.com/posts/","title":"Field Notes","reason":"Open the latest editorial analysis.","media_type":"text/html","json_url":"https://newruntime.com/posts.json"},{"type":"collection","path":"/sources/","url":"https://newruntime.com/sources/","title":"Sources","reason":"See the original sources this archive cites.","media_type":"text/html"}]}