Seat queue: maintaining idle containers that can turn to any app? ("stem containers")

[hq9000]

Dear maintainers,

thank you for the incredibly useful product you offer. We have a question/proposal we'd be glad to know your opinion on.

Our Setup

• we host a large number of different shiny apps apps (several dozens)
• we use Seat Queue feature to reduce waiting time for the users

Problem

The problem we face is that maintaining an idle container for each of the apps leads to significant RAM footprint - simply because there are too many containers.

Idea

our apps are similar to each other in a sense that before running the server, they all do certain preloading of the same data.

Our thinking goes as follows: that would be great if we could somehow maintain "stem containers" with above mentioned data preloaded, which, however, do not yet know which specific app the container will serve.

If that is possible, we can limit ourselves to maintaining only one idle container instead of a few dozens.

Do you think if we can somehow make shiny proxy work this way? Is there anything like this planned? If so, we would be willing to offer our help in terms of testing.

Thank you.