Ephemeral VMs in 1 Microsecond
Contribute to libriscv/drogon-sandbox development by creating an account on GitHub.
Ephemeral VMs in 1 Microsecond launched on December 20, 2024 with 84 votes, #417 of 5,365 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 1 year on.
In plain words
Ephemeral VMs in 1 Microsecond is a tool for developers and systems engineers who need to quickly spin up temporary virtual machines. It creates isolated VMs in microsecond timeframes, making it useful for testing, sandboxing, and rapid deployment scenarios. The project is open-source and available on GitHub, targeting users who require extreme speed in virtualization without the overhead of traditional VM startup times.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Multi-tenancy allows one server to be safely shared among many users, each of which cannot access each others or negatively affect the HTTP service. Specialized sandboxes are instantiated for each request and immediately destroyed after the request, all within a single microsecond. Note: This project is written like a production system, but contains only the necessary parts for realistic benchmarking. A real production system would have implemented a lot of observability, logging, metering etc. Sandboxed 'Hello World' responses with 8, 32 and 64 threads. $ ./wrk -c8 -t8 http://127.0.0.1:8080/z --latency Running 10s test @ http://127.0.0.1:8080/z 8 threads and 8 connections Thread Stats Avg…from github.com
Does a similar job
all alternatives →
Sub-millisecond VM sandboxes using CoW memory forkingMar 2026 · github.com · ▲311I wanted to see how fast an isolated code sandbox could start if I never had to boot a fresh VM. So instead of launching a new microVM per execution, I boot Firecracker once with Python and numpy already loaded, then snapshot the full VM state. Every execution after that creates a new KVM VM backed by a `MAP_PRIVATE` mapping of the snapshot memory, so Linux gives me copy-on-write pages automatically. That means each sandbox starts from an already-running Python process inside a real VM, runs the code, and exits. These are real KVM VMs, not containers: separate guest kernel, separate guest…
microvm – a minimalist machine type for QEMU inspired by Firecracker2019 · github.com · ▲145
Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machinesApr 2026 · github.com · ▲499Branchable computing by using a portable, lightweight, self-contained virtual machine - smol-machines/smolvm
A small virtual machine written in C2014 · github.com · ▲212"interesting" VM in C. Let's see how this goes. Contribute to tekknolagi/carp development by creating an account on GitHub.
Tiny VM sandbox in C with apps in Rust, C and ZigDec 2025 · github.com · ▲196Minimalist, dependency-free virtual machine sandbox for microcontrollers and other resource-constrained devices. Single C file, no dynamic memory allocations, asynchronous design, pure C99 - ringtailsoftware/uvm32
Tiny-vLLM – high performance LLM inference engine in C++ and CUDAMay 2026 · github.com · ▲205Build your own high performance LLM inference engine in C++ and CUDA - a smaller version of vLLM - jmaczan/tiny-vllm
Questions this answers
More dev tools this month
the category →

open-source IDE for thoughtful software design. Contribute to devdotfast/whiteboard development by creating an account on GitHub.
Dev tools · 27d ago · github.com

Contribute to reladraw/reladraw development by creating an account on GitHub.
Dev tools · 25d ago · github.com
OpenBot▲362Grok Bot alternative: free, local, open-source, multiplayer
Dev tools · 22d ago · openbot.run
Talanoa▲340Hi HN, I’m a fullstack developer, and honestly, I’ve lost count of how many side projects I’ve worked on over the years. But one idea kept coming back to me: a different kind of email client. It first came to me in 2014: “What if we could handle emails more like conversations?” Every year, I’d revisit this concept in my “Build Notes.” Ten years later, no one had built exactly what I had in mind — so I finally decided to do it myself. That’s how Talanoa was born. I wanted something focused on people, not timelines. I was tired of marking messages as unread just to remember to reply later, or…
Dev tools · 20d ago · talanoa.email
CoreSpeed▲332One MCP for everything your agents need: apps, memory, tools
Dev tools · 27d ago · corespeed.io
Source: Show HN post ↗