Restarting AWS lambda function to clear cache

Question

I have a AWS Lambda function that creates an object from a s3 call in cold start. I then hold the object in the cache while the function is warm to keep load times down. W

Answer 1

In addition to some of the valid answers above: I happened to run an experiment on the (average) AWS Lambda instance lifetime. I could not find instances that ran for much longer than (on average) two hours: https://xebia.com/blog/til-that-aws-lambda-terminates-instances-preemptively/.

TL;DR: AWS Lambda is preemptively terminating instances (even those handling traffic) after two hours, with a standard deviation of 30 minutes.