How long does a sandbox live?

A sandbox is not session-scoped. There are two separate limits, and only the first one is a time limit:

How long a sandbox can run continuously is capped by your plan.
How long a sandbox can stay paused is not capped at all. Paused sandboxes are kept indefinitely.

Continuous runtime limits

Plan	Max continuous runtime
Hobby	1 hour
Pro	24 hours
Enterprise	Custom

This is the time a sandbox can run without being paused. Pausing and resuming resets it, so a sandbox that pauses and resumes can be kept alive and reused for as long as you want. See Billing & limits.

What happens when the timeout expires

Every sandbox has a timeout. What happens when it expires is up to you, and the default is destructive:

onTimeout: 'kill' (the default) terminates the sandbox and releases its resources. A killed sandbox cannot be resumed, and its state is gone.
onTimeout: 'pause' pauses the sandbox instead. Both the filesystem and the memory are saved, which includes running processes and loaded variables.

Set autoResume to have a paused sandbox wake up on the next SDK call or HTTP request to one of its URLs.

import { Sandbox } from 'e2b'

const sandbox = await Sandbox.create({
  timeoutMs: 10 * 60 * 1000, // 10 minutes of running time
  lifecycle: {
    onTimeout: 'pause', // Defaults to 'kill'
    autoResume: true, // Wake on the next SDK call or HTTP request
  },
})

from e2b import Sandbox

sandbox = Sandbox.create(
    timeout=10 * 60,  # 10 minutes of running time
    lifecycle={
        "on_timeout": "pause",  # Defaults to "kill"
        "auto_resume": True,    # Wake on the next SDK call or HTTP request
    },
)

Auto-pause is persistent. If the sandbox resumes and later times out again, it pauses again. See Persistence and AutoResume.

Paused sandboxes do not expire

Paused sandboxes have no time-to-live. There is no automatic deletion, no archiving, and no expiry after a fixed number of days. E2B never kills a paused sandbox on its own. A paused sandbox is removed only when you explicitly kill it:

await Sandbox.kill(sandboxId)

Sandbox.kill(sandbox_id)

While a sandbox is paused it is not billed and does not count toward your concurrency limit, so keeping paused sandboxes around costs nothing in compute or concurrency. See Do paused sandboxes count toward the concurrency limit?.

Sandbox persistence for the full pause and resume flow
Filesystem-only snapshots for a lighter pause that drops memory
Snapshots for named, reusable checkpoints

Account, billing & limits

Templates & builds

Networking & deployment

Security & compliance

Migrations & deprecations

How long does a sandbox live?

Continuous runtime limits

What happens when the timeout expires

Paused sandboxes do not expire

​Continuous runtime limits

​What happens when the timeout expires

​Paused sandboxes do not expire

​Related

Continuous runtime limits

What happens when the timeout expires

Paused sandboxes do not expire

Related