1. An application execution system, comprising: a plurality of application servers, each application server in the plurality of application servers comprising non-volatile storage for storing a plurality of applications, volatile storage, and computational resources for executing applications in response to requests received by the application execution system; an application server in the plurality of application servers including instructions for: storing in non-volatile storage a plurality of applications distributed to the application server, wherein an application in the plurality of applications is a primed application, in a primed state, wherein the primed state is derived by: executing an unprimed application; obtaining a status signal from the unprimed application; checkpointing the unprimed application upon receipt of the status signal, to produce the primed application; and storing the primed application in the non-volatile storage; receiving from a client system, distinct from the plurality of application servers, a request to execute the primed application; in response to the request, loading the primed application from non-volatile storage into volatile storage and executing the primed application; and returning to the client system a first result to the request, wherein the first result is provided by the primed application.