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glossary

verified July 2026

Warm spill

Warm spill is serving capacity that is already running — model loaded, answering health checks — but takes traffic only when the primary fleet is full. Warm is the load-bearing word.

01

Warm vs cold

A cold spare must boot, load model weights, and warm its caches before serving its first request — an interval during which traffic fails. A warm tier holds the model in memory the whole time, and costs money while idle; that standing cost is what buys overflow that degrades instead of drops. The caller pays some latency; the caller never pays availability.

02

Where warm spill ends

Spill is not infinite. Past absolute capacity the API refuses fast with a retryable 503 at_capacity rather than queueing a live call into silence — a busy signal your orchestrator can act on, instead of dead air your caller cannot. Where this tier sits in our own serving — between the primary fleet and an independent fallback — is drawn on the reliability sheet.

See also

Related sheets.

Every term on this page is measurable on a live call — watch the readout while your own script synthesizes.

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