why am i able to use more compute than 10 ms even on a free plan?

i have not paid or entered any form of payment info yet i was under the assumption that on the free tier cloudflare worker only allows for 10ms of compute per request?
but as shown in the screenshot i have attached , i am able to go significantly above the limit for some odd reason , i decided to google it for more info and from what i see , it SHOULD be 10ms , yet why am i able to go SIGNIFICANTLY above that?
can someone clarify? thanks.

Jjoku i have not paid or entered any form of payment info yet i was under the assumpti...

Chaika•12/10/25, 5:52 PM

?cpu-time-overage

SuperHelpflare•12/10/25, 5:52 PM

From the Workers lead engineer on why you can sometimes use more CPU time than your limit (https://canary.discord.com/channels/595317990191398933/1204401951026974780/1204805369658867752):

Each isolate has a "rollover bank" of CPU time. If you use less than your limit on one request, the leftover time is added to the bank. If you use more than your limit on another request, time is taken out of the bank. Only when the bank reaches zero do you actually get an error.

Additionally, the bank does not start out empty. When an isolate first starts up, its bank is initialized with some extra time. This is meant to make up for the fact that the first few requests are likely to run slower as the isolate "warms up" (e.g. JIT-compiling code).

Actually, we probably give isolates too much initial time. There was a bug some years ago where we gave too much initial time by accident, and then it was hard to fix the bug without breaking people who came to rely on it. We kind of just said, ok whatever, and left it.

Because of the initial time, if your worker commonly executes only a small number of requests per isolate, it is indeed possible to exceed the limit regularly. But if you get enough traffic that individual isolates are commonly handling many requests, you'll start to see errors.

jokuOP•12/10/25, 5:57 PM

oooh , thanks. now it makes sense.

why am i able to use more compute than 10 ms even on a free plan?

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