We're actually median under 500ms — ~320ms median — I just didn't want to piss of hacker news with over estimatation.
We have another set of optimizations that we believe can take us to ~200ms in the next few months but beyond that we're pretty much completely stuck.
Realistically other sandboxes will be able to get there before us because we've chosen to support so much of Linux/if you don't run an operating system or don't support custom snapshots that is much easier.
Insane. Does it possible to fork to another bare metal machine? Maybe multi region as fly io.
If not, I bet you have huge disk sizes on your machines to store all the snapshots (you said, you store them and bill only for disk space).
So forking across multiple nodes in that speed is not possible — we run extremely beefy nodes in order to avoid moving VMs across nodes as much as possible.
We are researching systems of hot moving VMs across VMs but it would have very different performance characteristics.
Our tech is not decades old so there is a chance we've missed something but our layer management is atomic so I'd be shocked if you'd be able to corrupt state across forks/snapshots.