Petition against the High Resource Usage system

[nullcity.dev91]

That's not likely to happen.

The problem here is that people don't realise what sort of environment they're running in. They'll complain that "I'm only doing X" (where X sounds perfectly reasonable to them), but fail to see the cumulative effect that can have if even a significant minority of users do the same thing. It's called the Tragedy of the commons.

The current per-account limit is 300 CPU∙seconds per hour. That's five full minutes of core time. If everyone used all of that entitlement, each processor core on a server would support only 12 users; a 64-core machine (16 quad-core processors) would support something less than 768 accounts (remember that the server itself needs some of its own resources -- 768 accounts would ignore things like, oh, running the operating system, doing backups, etc.). Keep in mind, too, that RAM is a limited resource -- 768 accounts at 128MB of RAM represents 96GB of RAM.

Luckily, most accounts use nowhere near their entitlement -- but it doesn't take too many accounts running over their limit to use up all of the available resources. 384 users running on the system I've described at double their limit uses everything, as does 192 running at four times the limit. Of course, you could just limit the number of accounts on a server to, say, 320 and give everybody a lot of breathing space -- but have you priced a 64-core server with 96GB of RAM lately? And did you remember to include the electricity, air conditioning, storage, backup, admin, UPS, generators, and so on that will make the server work? How likely do you think it is that such a service could be offered gratis (assuming there are no benevolent billionaires in sight)?

Yes, there are multiple redundant physical machines running behind a load balancer in the "real" version of an x10Hosting Free Hosting server, but there are also thousands of accounts on each of the servers to make free accounts viable at all. If even a small percentage run over the rather generous limits*, they'd wipe out the available resources in no time.

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* I ran more than a hundred customer-facing and internal corporate web applications supporting thousands of users on a dual-processor Pentium III/800MHz server with 512MB of very expensive ECC RAM less than ten years ago. Don't try to tell me your single low-traffic application can't be written to run within the limits provided here. You're getting a 3GHz processor on an 8.3% duty cycle, or the equivalent of a 1GHz processor on a 25% duty cycle -- that can serve a heck of a lot of requests. And if it's a high-traffic app, why are you running on a free hosting plan with no SLA?

okay

---------- Post added at 04:23 AM ---------- Previous post was at 04:20 AM ----------

Oh no! I used 7.4 seconds!

 

[callumacrae]

I wonder if MyBB is causing a resource hog. I personally use phpBB, and don't use MyBB.

MyBB is fairly resource heavy, but not quite as bad as SMF. phpBB is excellent in terms of resource usage. Not sure about IPB and vB, never used them seriously.

 

[Livewire]

MyBB is fairly resource heavy, but not quite as bad as SMF. phpBB is excellent in terms of resource usage. Not sure about IPB and vB, never used them seriously.

vB's pretty good when running, but under the old HRU system it would actually trip 3 separate times during install, necessitating either patience during install (waiting for it to clear) or having a mod/admin remove the third HRU suspension that needed staff to remove.

Under the current system though I would venture to guess it would install just fine, but may cause the Resource Limits Hit page to appear shortly afterward, but once it's running it should be okay.

 

[callumacrae]

phpBB used to trigger it during updates (sometimes), but not during the installs.

 

[amresh_rai47]

Hello Admin,

I would like to know if there is any way the customers would come to know if their domain is suspended because of over usage of resources i.e are you guys sending email alert for the same or simply disabling the domain ? If customers will get an email alert if there domain is suspended then it will be great.

Also instead of performing the resource usage calculation on hourly basis it would be great if you guys will perform this on daily basis because we are not working with the site for the whole day. Making any modification/changes to the site might increase the resource usage for that specific hour but the traffic will be negligible for the rest of the days.

 

[Dead-i]

I would like to know if there is any way the customers would come to know if their domain is suspended because of over usage of resources i.e are you guys sending email alert for the same or simply disabling the domain ? If customers will get an email alert if there domain is suspended then it will be great.

This used to happen with the old system, but then the new system automatically unsuspends the site after one hour so an email didn't seem necessary.

Also instead of performing the resource usage calculation on hourly basis it would be great if you guys will perform this on daily basis because we are not working with the site for the whole day. Making any modification/changes to the site might increase the resource usage for that specific hour but the traffic will be negligible for the rest of the days.

While this might benefit some users, most users will probably feel that they wish their site to be online as much as possible. If the suspension calculation was performed daily, this would mean more time in the Suspended page meaning more downtime, which some users might not appreciate.

Oh, and also, I'm not an admin. I'm sort of a volunteer.

 

[callumacrae]

It's not done every hour, it's done live - otherwise scripts that intentionally grab resources would survive for a lot longer than they do now (a couple seconds, I believe)

 

[Dead-i]

@callum: I think he was talking about the duration of time it takes for an account to be unsuspended, which is an hour.

 

[theone48]

Useful Tip: As I've been asked this many times, I always reccomend waiting 24 hours for any system task, just to be on the safe side.