Infrequently-used serverless code may suffer from greater response [[latency (engineering)|latency]] than code that is continuously running on a dedicated server, virtual machine, or container. This is because, unlike with an autoscaling, the cloud provider typically "spins down" the serverless code completely when not in use. This means that if the runtime (for example, the [[Java (programming language)|Java]] runtime) in use requires a significant amount of time to start up, that will introduce latency into request handling. However, not all code is latency-sensitive; for example, [[batch processing]] operations run by [[cron job]]s might not be significantly affected by small, infrequent latencies such as this.
