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Back in March, I wrote about Oracle Cloud's stupid definition of "idle" compute resources and the potential impact on capsules hosted using the "Always Free" service. This is a quick update/warning to say that the thresholds for what is considered idle have changed from 10% to 20%. I don't recall seeing any notification of this until yesterday when I received an email saying that my server (where this capsule is hosted) had failed to meet the threshold over the last 7 days (and so would be shut down after a further 7 days).
This is the updated definition of an "idle" server:
> 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 20%
> * Network utilization is less than 20%
> * Memory utilization is less than 20% (applies to A1 shapes only)
So far I've been getting by with very low CPU and network load and a small program that runs on startup to allocate and write to enough RAM to tip over the threshold, so you do only need one of these cases to be true.
Luckily I'm on an "A1 shape" VM. The other VM types offer much worse specs, but I'm sure plenty of people do use them (e.g. due to availability issues) and many of those will opt to burn CPU cycles to meet the threshold, which is just a pointless waste of electricity. Even ignoring the environmental implications (which definitely shouldn't be ignored!), I wouldn't be suprised if this costs Oracle more in wasted power than it makes them in new paying customers. To quote myself (from a reply to someone else's woes with the Always Free tier):
> I highly doubt anyone who has experienced using Oracle Cloud Always Free would be willing to pay them! [...] I know that if anyone I knew (e.g. my employer) suggested using paid Oracle Cloud services I would heavily recommend choosing a different provider after my experiences with the free tier.
I've increased the usage of the RAM-wasting program on my server for now, but I think this is finally the tipping point where I'm going to at least look into alternative hosts.
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