What is Turbo Mode?
Turbo Mode is a per-Robot Transloadit setting, controlled by the turbo parameter, that parallelizes supported work to return results sooner. It is opt-in for /video/encode, and on by default for /document/thumbs and /file/decompress.
How Turbo Mode works
Turbo Mode changes how supported Transloadit Robots schedule work by distributing processing that would otherwise proceed more serially and by emitting eligible results as they become available. The media Instructions and requested output remain the governing recipe; the acceleration comes from concurrency and earlier emission. Defaults differ per Robot: Turbo Mode is off for the video Robots and on for /document/thumbs and /file/decompress. Check the cost and latency trade-off for each Step rather than assuming one default. It belongs in latency-sensitive Assembly design where capacity use, result ordering, and downstream readiness are planned together.
Key facts
- 1The documented up-to-22x acceleration applies to
/video/encodeand/video/concat, whereturbodefaults tofalse; chunked encoding consumes extra Priority Job Slots, and thechunk_durationparameter tunes how many. - 2For
/document/thumbs,turbodefaults totrue: pages are extracted and resized in parallel and emitted individually. Pricing adds the input document’s file size for every extracted page, so controlling multi-page cost means settingturbo: falseexplicitly. - 3
/file/decompressalso defaults toturbo: true, emitting extracted files as soon as they are available at a billing surcharge, so downstream Steps must handle early results and cost-sensitive archive workflows should disable it.
When Turbo Mode matters
For the video Robots, enable Turbo Mode when lower completion latency justifies the extra Priority Job Slot usage. For /document/thumbs and /file/decompress it is already on and adds processing charges, so set turbo: false when cost matters more than speed.