Is max idle instances supposed to work yet ?

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Tim Hoffman

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Aug 31, 2011, 8:44:52 PM8/31/11
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Hi

I turned off always on, and set max idle instances to 1, to see what sort of impact it would have on my predicted billing.
New billing suggests just having the equivalent of always on will cost around $90 per month.

However with max idle instances set to 1, I frequently see no instances.  There are no errors in the log, 
the scheduler is just shutting them down.

I can deal with just one idle instance, or maybe none if I can keep memcache primed, 
I can start a new instance and server from memcache < 200ms (M/S)

But I would like to see what it runs like with 1 permanent idle instance.

Thanks

Tim 

Tim Hoffman

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Aug 31, 2011, 9:13:10 PM8/31/11
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Oops

Don't mind me, I forgot what f max idle instances really means.

Looks like I really need a min idle instances knob, so I don't have to 
keep pinging the site to keep at least a single instance hot.

Tim

Gregory D'alesandre

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Aug 31, 2011, 9:32:06 PM8/31/11
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Hey Tim, the min idle instance knob will be available for all paid apps once the new pricing is in place!

Greg

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Tim Hoffman

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Aug 31, 2011, 10:17:48 PM8/31/11
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Phew, thats good to know.

Rgds

T

Jeff Deskins

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Sep 1, 2011, 11:27:50 AM9/1/11
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Greg - If you have both min and max idle instance set to one - would that be similar to always-on but within the one-instance per 24hr free quota for a paid app?

My app is primarily used during sporting events and would only need the one instance always-on the rest of the time.  I would be paying for the extra instances being used when traffic peaks to n-pages per sec during the events.

Right now, with always-on, it looks like I can't set the max idle instances below three and would be paying for extra instances that I wouldn't need majority of the time.

Thanks for any clarification,
Jeff

Gregory D'alesandre

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Sep 1, 2011, 11:36:58 AM9/1/11
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Hi Jeff,

Currently Always-On will keep 3 instances running all the time, but when you have lots of traffic it will bring up as many instances as are needed to serve the traffic.  Setting the min idle instances to 1 will keep 1 instance running all the time, and when your traffic comes up it will start to spin up more instances to serve that traffic.  Setting the max idle instances to 1 will mean that when you have a larger surge of traffic coming, we will only ever spin up 1 more instance at a time to serve that traffic.  Currently the scheduler will sometimes spin up and keep up multiple instances if it looks like the traffic needs it.  If you have an application that will only get large amounts of traffic during certain timeframes, I think your plan sounds good, other than during the even I might change max instances to 3 or 4 rather than 1.

Hope that helps!

Greg

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Jon McAlister

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Sep 6, 2011, 3:24:33 PM9/6/11
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Hi Tim,

In your case, I think what would suit you well is to set
max-idle-instances=1 (you've already done that) and
min-idle-instances=1. The latter knob is not yet available but will be
available once the pricing rollout is complete. In the short-term you
could have a cron job keep your instance alive by sending it requests
once per minute.

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