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As a customer of Linode, I feel like I'm getting a lot, maybe too much, for the money I pay. For $5 per month, I have a CPU running continuously near 100% util
by atomic128 2y ago
As a customer of Linode, I feel like I'm getting a lot, maybe too much, for the money I pay.
For $5 per month, I have a CPU running continuously near 100% utilization, training and retraining L1/L2/L3-CPU-cache-resident transformers, looking for patterns in futures and options markets.
This kind of extreme resource utilization is becoming more common, and these businesses have to adapt to stay profitable.
I expect Linode to change the price on me, eventually.
- dangus 2y agoI don’t find that to be all that impressive. I’m immediately saving money with the server I built out of mostly used parts and threw in my closet compared to VPS solutions. The only reason it’s near 100% utilization is because $5 VPS instances have barely any computing power assigned to them. For the same price as one game server I’m running something like 5-8 VMs at once. I can utilize 128GB of RAM and 6/12 real CPU cores (Ryzen 3600).
- Aeolun 2y agoCompletely unrelated, but I’m surprised how many people actually use the Ryzen 3600, from desktops to servers, it seems to be everywhere.
- terribleperson 2y agoI expect to see the same thing from the 5600. With AMD still selling 5000-series CPUs and their prices so low, they must be incredibly tempting to anyone who needs a lot of CPUs.
- throwaway2037 2y agoWhat is your annual electricity cost for that server in your closet?
- christophilus 2y agoI’d like to know this too, along with how you mitigate traffic spikes while using the internet connection as both your home internet and your public internet.
- dangus 2y agoThere are no traffic spikes, it’s not serving web content to the public internet. I probably should have been a little more clear that I don’t think VPS systems are bad or anything, it’s just that they aren’t well-suited to game servers and hardware in my closet is well-suited to it. I was spending almost 20 euros a month for a single Hetzner cloud instance that performed worse than all my gaming VMs on my closet computer. But if I was serving a public website or app I would probably not want it going through my home internet.
- dangus 2y agoI don’t know but probably a bit under $5 a month if 35 watts is my guess at the system idle. I haven’t bothered metering it.
- ryukoposting 2y agoWhat's the justification for this approach? Buy an old NUC with some cheap Celeron in it, install Hamachi if you need remote access, and it'll pay for itself in a couple months.
- Firerouge 2y agoSeeing as they are paying $5 a month, how do you expect buying a NUC to pay for itself in a few months? Where are you finding NUCs for $20 with free electricity?
- viraptor 2y agoAny decommissioned office PC from eBay will be faster than $5 linode. For example search for optiflex https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=optiplex+pc&_udhi=30 https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=optiplex+pc&_udhi=30 They're not too power hungry either if you make sure not to go for i7s
- dboreham 2y agoBut it'll cost $100+/yr in electricity.
- viraptor 2y agoThere are optiplex models running at 14W or less when idle. In my area that's ~$20 per year. (It close to half of that in practice with solar)
- rsanek 2y agoBased on your ebay link, the cheapest PCs are around $50 shipped. Including the electricity, that's $70/year. So you'd need more than a year to have this approach pay off, and additionally you will have saddled yourself with managing a physical machine rather than have someone else abstract it for you. Doesn't seem to pass the "it'll pay for itself in a couple months" claim.
- gear54rus 2y agoDon't think we're close to that point yet. You can still get the same server for free from oracle free tier if you're willing to put up with god awful enterprisey control panel. Also that linode CPU is virtualized (i.e. at least some of that cache is shared).
- dizhn 2y agoOracle has people jumping all kinds of hoops to get that service too. Just like Hetzner. Took me a few tries with different credit cards then tried to get one for my friend with their card and nothing would work. Great free service though. That ampere vm with 24 gb ram is quite capable.
- qwertox 2y agoIt's most likely a vCPU. So even the caches are shared.
- renewiltord 2y agoIf I recall Linode has a "dedicated core" feature which reserves a CPU core for you, but I doubt that is $5/month so you're likely right. User must be quite lucky to have no utilization on host for process to not get cache-evicted.
- wiredfool 2y agoHetzner, in volume, is about 5x cheaper than limped for my workloads. Limped is 2-3 times cheaper than AWS, but AWS has a few things going for it that make it worth it for some workloads.
- wiredfool 2y agoLinode. Decking autocarrot.
- shrubble 2y agoYou have a CPU? Or a core, that is 1 of many cores on a system where your VM can be and will be pre-empted by the host node’s scheduler without your VM having any control or insight into the process?
- edm0nd 2y agoCouldn't you just buy a used decent PC and run this on its CPU + GPU and get faster/better results?
- whalesalad 2y agoWhy is this attitude so commonplace? Servers are worthless to a hosting company without utilization. It’s in their best interest to have them pegged 100%. Like airplanes - they don’t make money when they are empty. Why do so many in this thread think “I am using 100% of what I pay for! They are bound to change it soon!” That’s not how it works. If I offer you service for a fee, I’m going to allow you to use 100% of that service for that fee.
- sureIy 2y agoMaximized by flat rate payer, minimized by pay-per-use. You want to maximize it, the hosting definitely prefers someone who pays and doesn't use, so they can double-book that server.
- keyle 2y agoI'm not sure why you compare this to airplanes. Airplanes fuel consumption is very expensive if the plane is empty relative to profit. They need to put bums in seats for the flight to be viable commercially. On the other hand, a flat out rack takes more power than an idle one. So this isn't the same thing at all.
- throwaway2037 2y agoYeah, the GP comment is so dumb. Most commercial aircraft are owned by a few leasing companies. They would love if lessors didn't fly the aircraft, but paid leasing fees!
- CGamesPlay 2y agoThis is absolutely untrue in both a naive and more nuanced sense. Naively, it's not like an airplane, it's like an airplane rented by the month: the owner of the airplane collects rent whether or not the airplane is flying. More nuanced, many VPS providers don't sell you 100% CPU utilization; they sell you a compute budget. AWS actually enforces this; I don't know about other providers. But if you're exceeding your compute budget and the provider doesn't enforce the budget limit, you can expect the system to break at some point.
- 2y ago
- keyle 2y agoOff topic, your website is interesting, I wish I knew how to interpret it "commitment of traders". Maybe there is a blog post somewhere?
- prmoustache 2y ago> This kind of extreme resource utilization is becoming more common, and these businesses have to adapt to stay profitable. The fact a usage is common doesn't mean it is profitable or that it needs to be supported for a hosting service to be profitable. Mining crypto used to become quite common as well a decade ago and tall hosting services banned this exactly for because there was no way they could be profitable and offer decent QoS.
- Dylan16807 2y agoOne core isn't very expensive, and when we look at modern super dense CPUs full load is less than 5 watts per core.