Two Feature Requests

[programmer2188]

Two things Id love to see in CloudLinux:

1. Burstable limits (soft limits), especially for RAM. For instance, Id love to be able to specify a limit of 512 MB, but burstable up to say 1 GB or something like that.

2. Measure CPU in MHz. Not sure if this is possible at all, but give each account a certain measure of the CPU, in MHz instead of percent. Right now we
e doing this by calculating the closest percent to the amount we want to give, but itd be nice to be able to specify this.

[iseletsk]

#1 I still don like the idea, but it is work in progress. Explaining to user why yesterday it was working, but today it does , due to RAM no longer being available for bursting will be very unpleasant. Yet, it fits our long term strategy of support for reseller limits anyway -- so it will be done.

#2 It is easy to do, given that we know the core frequency, yet this day measure is as meaningless -- as most others. Hz for Hz - even two intel processes can give very different performance - based on pipelines, cache, and bunch of other things. At first I wanted to say no, but the idea is kind of sinking in with me, as it is more portable then saying specifying 1 core, or 150% of a core.
This way you can specify 3ghz of CPU power, and CL will take calculate proper percentage based on the CPUs in the server.

[programmer2188]

Thanks Igor. I am glad that these ideas may be implemented. I think both would be very useful.

What we
e trying to do is to dedicate resources to each account, similar to how it would be for a VPS., but of course things like MySQL, mail, CPanel and such would be shared. This reduces costs for the users while guaranteeing much more stability to their sites, and they can pay for the extra resources as they want/need them. CloudLinux is really helping us to do this, but these two things would make it even better, so thank you for considering it.

[clm]

I agree that burstable limits that allow all available CPU is a bad idea. However I would like the idea of allowing a percentage of burst for a period of time. For example if the average usage for 1 hour is over 75% of allowed CPU limit the CPU to 75% if for the next hour its over 50% limit to 50% and keep at 50% until the average CPU goes down below 45% for an hour…

This would allow a customer who needs more CPU for processing a single web page to have the extra CPU but a customer whos encoding video would be quickly limited.

Weve got 32CPUs on our latest servers which means a few users using 100% of their CPU isnt a problem and we should always have available CPU for everyone. Applying further limits after heavy utilisation for a long period of time will help a customer rearlise his script has a problem.

[programmer2188]

Well, Im speaking specifically of burstable RAM, such as you would get in a VPS environment with many providers. So for instance, limit an account to 512 MB, but be able to burst to 1 GB when needed and if available.

[clm]

Sorry about the missunderstanding.

We allow more ram then our customers need and have just increased the amount of RAM on our servers so we are far fr om hitting any physical limits.

We limit to 2GB on our beginner accounts and no customers hit this limit so far.

RAM is quite cheap now, most suppliers now give more ram than needed (more ram than available GHZ) and disk capabilities. Weve decided to invest in alot of RAM for our latest configurations so are not rearly concerned by burstable RAM capabilities.

I do vouch however for the limits being based to a maximum average per hour instead of what is rearly available (be it ram, CPU or IO lim its). It would obviously need to not allow bursts when there is less than a defined amount of ressources available but we would not be concerned by the "when available" beacause we want to guarantee ressources and not just say "when available" and oversell available ressources.

As far as we are concerned if a server regularly needs to disallow bursts due to lack of available ressources then it has been oversold.