"Elf-Disclosure" for October 2023
We've been in prod for 3 months now, and like September, October was mostly spent on bugfixes and backend improvements, which I'll detail below.
Here are some shiny stats for October 2023, followed by a summary of some of the user-facing changes announced this month in the blog...
Stats
Resources
Most apps consume almost no CPU while idle - the larger consumers are streamers doing transcoding, and download clients doing download/unpack operations.
Average CPU utilization increased roughly 30% from last month.
Last month (Sep 2023)'s for comparison:
This graph represents memory usage across the entire cluster. By far the largest consumers of RAM is rook-ceph. Like CPU utilization, there appears to be no month-on-month growth this month, but this data was recorded after deprovisioned accounts were pruned, so it's likely that actual used RAM has increased.
Last month (Sep 2023)'s for comparison:
I'm not sure these stats are accurate, they've likely overly high because pods on the host network (like metallb, ceph, etc) will end up counting all traffic on each host, rather than the pod itself. However, the graph still gives a good indication of network usage compared to the previous month.
The network graphs indicate a 3-4 x increase in network usage, which is consistent with the much higher traffic graphs for October, compared to September.
Last month (Sep 2023)'s for comparison:
These are the traffic stats for egress from Hetzner. They exclude any traffic to/from Hetzner Storageboxes.
Network traffic increased 100% from the previous period, although it's notable that the large spike from Oct 15 to Oct 25th was the likely cause, rather than a steady-state increase.
Last month (Sep 2023)'s for comparison:
Ceph provides our own storage ("[ElfStorage][elfstorage]"), typically used for long-term slow storage and seeding. While the read/write IOPS and throughput gauges below are useless for trending (they're just a single point in time, I'm working on adding better metrics), the capacity graph indicates that we've consumed 100% more capacity compared to the previous month.
Last month (Sep 2023)'s for comparison:
What's new?
Plex BYOVPN saves the day
As threatened, Plex pulled the plug on Hetzner IP ranges, breaking any Plex services hosted on Hetzner without a VPN.
Our users who migrated to a Plex VPN solution were not impacted, and I've now removed the non-VPN Plex product from the store, so any future Plex subscriptions will require a VPN.
More details in this blog post.
Radarr upgraded to v5
Radarr v5 has been released, and we automatically got the updated (albeit a few weeks late, because config file changes meant our images builds were failing!)
More details in this blog post.
Low ElfBuckz balance notifications
Cosplaying a PHP developer, I altered our ElfBuckz (account credits) plugin to send email notifications when your ElfBuckz balance drops below $2. Aside from some flakey maths at first, this seems to be working well now, and is hopefully part of the reason for the uptick in revenue this month (rather than either turning off services or failing to properly deprovision them!)
More details in this blog post.
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