The Neon team has made significant improvements in reducing the "cold start time" for compute resources, which refers to the time it takes for idle computes to become active again. The current cold start time is around 500 milliseconds, a major improvement from previous times of up to 3-6 seconds. This achievement was made possible by applying optimization strategies such as only reconfiguring when necessary and creating a concept of "compute pools" that always have an available compute ready for use. Additionally, the team has implemented changes in configuration tracking, networking, caching, concurrency, and autoscaling to further improve performance. The ultimate goal is to reduce the cold start time even further, with hopes of reaching 50 milliseconds or less.