The Always Alive add-on ensures that your bot maintains a continuously active compute instance, thereby eliminating the latency associated with cold starts.

Botpress bots are powered by remote, virtual compute instances. Every time your bot begins a conversation, for example when a Trigger is activated or a new user sends a message, Botpress spins up a new instance for that bot. This is known as a 'cold start', which refers to the initial startup process when a virtual machine (VM) or a serverless function is launched for the first time, or after it has been idle and terminated.

During a cold start, the system must allocate resources, initialize the environment, load necessary code, and perform any required configuration before the instance is ready to handle requests or tasks.

Always Alive reserves an instance for your bot so that it can bypass this cold start and maintains a ready-to-use instance. The end result is that the first message sent and received from your bot are processed faster.

Always Alive can be purchased and allocated on a per-bot basis.