Comment by ku1ik

Comment by ku1ik 11 hours ago

12 replies

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asciinema.org is currently being hugged to death! The btop stream is from one of the servers, currently reporting 95% CPU usage: https://asciinema.org/s/olesiD03BIFH6Yz1

But it's chugging along!

asciinema server is Elixir/Phoenix, runs on BEAM, and even with lots of connections and high CPU usage it serves request fine. Power of the BEAM. Phew.

Currently it runs on just 2 VMs, 2 GB of RAM each, so I will probably need to scale it up very soon anyway :)

darkamaul 10 hours ago

In an age where everything is about clouds, it’s pretty amazing to see a high-profile service like this running smoothly on just a couple of 2 GB VMs. That’s less RAM than a mid-range laptop, and those machines struggle to run a modern browser.

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  • imiric 8 hours ago

    Modern hardware in conjunction with smart software choices can be very capable, but it's pretty negligent to run a service people depend on with such limited resources.

    Sure, not every site needs to run on a highly-available elastic cluster of nodes, but the alternative mindset of actively rejecting this architecture is arguably even more harmful.

    A healthy deployment should be able to scale up and down easily, if not automatically. I wouldn't want to be woken up at 3am because prod1 needs a CPU/RAM/disk increase and a reboot, and the users wouldn't like that either.

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    • ku1ik 7 hours ago

      There’s few reasons for this. First, I don’t have infinite budget for this, in fact the budget is close to 0 (sponsorships and donations help). Second, the servers are sponsored by Brightbox, and I’ve been running asciinema.org there for over a decade because BB is reliable and they’re great chaps, but I don’t have infinite resources available there. Finally, I don’t want devops complexity in my side projects.

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    • arccy 7 hours ago

      > service people depend on

      why wouldn't you cap a free service? imo it's more irresponsible to demand other people keep a thing you don't pay for running just because you happen to depend on it.

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    • phaer 8 hours ago

      Sounds preferable compared to be woken up at 5 am by your cloud providers billing alert.

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mayli 8 hours ago

That btop stream is lagging hard now, and jumping between full cpu and idle 0%.

Is the service crashing and restarting?

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  • ku1ik 7 hours ago

    I was adding more VMs and restarting load balancer. Should be good now.

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ku1ik 7 hours ago

Just scaled it up, seems pretty stable and responsive again.

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imiric 8 hours ago

Tip: you might want to decrease the btop refresh rate. It's likely that at 100ms a considerable amount of CPU time is taken up by btop itself.

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  • ku1ik 8 hours ago

    The CPU usage was single digit (%) with no viewers (but other requests being served) with btop at 100ms, so that's not adding a lot. But thanks!

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lostmsu 10 hours ago

Thanks for the great service! Is there a way to mirror the streams? Like a Wikipedia dump?

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