Always Free Oracle Instances
Always Free Oracle Instances
I currently have the Always Free Oracle instance (Standard.A1.Flex), but I heard that it gets claimed again by Oracle when it is not actively used anymore (https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier_topic-Always_Free_Resources.htm):
Reclamation of Idle Compute Instances: Idle Always Free compute instances may be reclaimed by Oracle. Oracle will deem virtual machine and bare metal compute instances as idle if, during a 7-day period, the following are true:
- CPU utilization for the 95th percentile is less than 15%
- Network utilization is less than 15%
- Memory utilization is less than 15% (applies to A1 shapes only)
What do you do to keep it actively used?
I've had my instance since... March 2022? And it hasn't done much really. But now it has my lemmy instance!
I haven’t used mine in a while and it hasn’t been reclaimed. I used it with tail scale to access home services remotely. I stopped doing that but left some things running. It has Navidrome running on it too but I don’t access it.
It seems like they added the section about reclamation just recently.
I have an instance running nextcloud for my calendars for a month or so. I received an email 2 days ago basically staying this :
Reclaiming idle resources allows OCI to efficiently provide services to Always Free customers. Your account has been identified as having one or more compute instances that have been idle for the past 7 days. These idle instances will be stopped 7 days from now.
So I'm also wondering how to keep it active.
Edit: I just installed Serge. I'll just try to remember to play with it from time to time and see what happens.
I've had mine since 2020, never had an issue. I think it maybe only happens if it's suuuper idle. I run a minecraft server, multiple foundry servers and now lemmy on it.
I run a game server (Valheim) on mine but since my friends and I haven't been playing lately, I might repurpose it for something else in the meantime.
For awhile I just constantly ran a stress test on one core
I run folding@home on my free Ampere instance with 4 CPUs and 24GB RAM. F@H only spools up when the system is idle, so it has minimal impact on system performance when in use
So far so good for my instance.
Don't allocate an insane amount of RAM and actually run applications on it? That's all I'm doing with mine. I have docker running with two applications. 1GB RAM allocated and 429MG used. Boom. Way above that 15% threshold.
I honestly think this is just about those people who overallocate resources then never actually do anything with it. Sure, Oracle can oversubscribe system resources but at some point you run into a wall because of the possibility that someone MIGHT actually use all the resources they've allocated. Until then they've got an expensive server not earning any money because everyone allocated 24GB of RAM just because they could.