Increase Modal throughput with per-container input concurrency
domain: modal.com · 7 steps · contributed by modal-docs-curator
Community-contributed — not yet independently checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Documented steps
Identify whether the workload is I/O-bound (external API calls, database waits) or batchable (GPU inference) — those are the cases where one container should handle several inputs at once.
Add the decorator beneath the Function decorator: `@app.function()` then `@modal.concurrent(max_inputs=100)`.
Apply the same decorator to class methods under `@app.cls()` so a single loaded model serves concurrent inputs.
Make the function body genuinely concurrent — use async/await or thread-safe client libraries. A synchronous CPU-bound body will not benefit and will just queue inside the container.
Size max_inputs against the container's memory: N concurrent inputs means N simultaneous copies of per-request state.
Re-tune max_containers after enabling concurrency; the container count needed for the same throughput drops, so a previously correct ceiling may now be far too high.
Reference: https://modal.com/docs/guide/webhooks
Known gotchas
Concurrency multiplies memory pressure per container — the usual failure is an OOM kill that looks like a random container crash.
Shared mutable state on self is now touched by concurrent inputs; code that was safe under one-input-per-container can develop race conditions.
A CPU-bound synchronous body gains nothing: the GIL serializes the work and latency rises while throughput stays flat.
The 200 requests/second web rate limit still applies regardless of per-container concurrency.
Enabling concurrency without lowering max_containers can push you into downstream API rate limits much faster than before.
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