# What Is Cold recovery?

> Cold recovery is the case where a session's KV cache is no longer in GPU memory and its context state must be restored when the next request arrives. There are two ways to restore it: read the KV cache back from external storage, or have the GPU recompute the whole context. Many sessions recovering at once is often called a session-recovery storm.

URL: https://vuke.top/en/glossary/cold-recovery · Updated November 12, 2026

Cold recovery is the case where a session's KV cache is no longer in GPU memory and its context state must be restored when the next request arrives. There are two ways to restore it: read the KV cache back from external storage, or have the GPU recompute the whole context. Many sessions recovering at once is often called a session-recovery storm.

## In the measurements

The 480B benchmarks quoted on this site use exactly this long-context cold-recovery load, the typical stress of agent and coding-assistant workloads [R2](https://vuke.top/en/evidence/R2).

Source: [R2](https://vuke.top/en/evidence/R2)