[dacm]

It is in our case. This is a service which is very seasonal, so it may be used during a couple of days each month only. Having a bunch of instances mostly idle would definitely be more expensive

[yourapostasy]

How much delay from a cold start can your application tolerate? On the order of tenths of a second or up to one second?

[dacm]

Being that the data is queried from a web app through HTTP, the shorter the better. Around 1 sec should be alright, but 6 - 8 definitely isn't