3 Million Agent Sandboxes a Day, 380,000 at Once: Inside DeepSeek's DSec — and the Open-Source Twin You Can Self-Host

Sun, 27 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On 26 September 2026 a systems paper hit the top of Hacker News with numbers that do not look like a research result at all. DeepSeek Elastic Compute (DSec) — arXiv 2609.22978, submitted 19 September 2026, 31 pages, 13 figures, 131 authors — describes a production sandbox platform that serves about 3 million sandbox instances per day from a single deployment unit of roughly 160 nodes, sustains over 5,000 sandbox creations per second, and holds over 380,000 concurrent sandboxes at peak.

Those three numbers are the reason the thread exists (143 points, 40 comments at the time of writing). They are also the reason the thread immediately split in two directions: people doing capacity arithmetic (“that’s only 12 sandboxes per core”), and people asking whether any of it is usable.

Kimi K3 on SoloSoft

3 Million Agent Sandboxes a Day, 380,000 at Once: Inside DeepSeek's DSec — and the Open-Source Twin You Can Self-Host