Selling/Donating idle CPU time

Just leave it idle and you are donating it to the dozens of other linodes that share your host. Using it for the sake of using it is really not productive.

Be nice to your VPS neighbors man, don't use a VPS for mining >.<

Lol, ok I'll be nice to all on my box :D

I didn't released the CPU was shared in such a way. :shock:

@Nuvini:

Be nice to your VPS neighbors man, don't use a VPS for mining >.<

I think I remember seeing here that deliberately maxing out your CPU is considered abuse. I don't know if Linode would do anything about it though.

It's not, if you legitimately use it. If you want to use your linode to host an application that does calculations and will max out all 8 CPU cores 24/7, you're perfectly free to do that. There are customers who DO do that, and there's nothing wrong with it; if it were going to cause an impact, Linode would schedule CPU priority differently.

That said, if you don't legitimately need the CPU time, don't try to figure out ways to waste it.

@sednet:

@Nuvini:

Be nice to your VPS neighbors man, don't use a VPS for mining >.<

I think I remember seeing here that deliberately maxing out your CPU is considered abuse. I don't know if Linode would do anything about it though.
The terms of service have clauses about "Misuse of System Resources" and "harmful to the operations of" Linode – and, of course, "or for any other reason" -- but they're certainly not nazis about CPU usage, and I don't think I've ever heard of someone getting in trouble. The honor system seems to be sufficient here. Don't be a jerk.

I asked about this a little while ago (probably 18+ months ago now) and the reply from staff suggested that people who 'over used' their cpu would get a fair share of the overall cpu on the box, but people who typically 'under utilized' the cpu of the box would find they had access to a much higher 'burstable' amount of resources.

If you said the total cpu power of a linode box was 48GHz, an there are 20 hosts per box, each host would only have 2.4GHz of cpu available.

Instead of being capped to just this amount of cpu, assuming all your neighbours are behaving, your will find you can utilize far more than this, being able to 'burst' up to 24GHz.

You will never have less than 2.4GHz available to you, but likely have much more.

People who frequently run at 100% cpu, will find they will become unable to 'burst' above a certain limit. This would mean more resources are available to the well behaving hosts.

Edit:

These numbers are made up, and the system has likely evolved since this discussion.

@mnordhoff:

@sednet:

@Nuvini:

Be nice to your VPS neighbors man, don't use a VPS for mining >.<

I think I remember seeing here that deliberately maxing out your CPU is considered abuse. I don't know if Linode would do anything about it though.
The terms of service have clauses about "Misuse of System Resources" and "harmful to the operations of" Linode – and, of course, "or for any other reason" -- but they're certainly not nazis about CPU usage, and I don't think I've ever heard of someone getting in trouble. The honor system seems to be sufficient here. Don't be a jerk.

I used to think that was the case, but today I actually got an "abuse ticket" opened on me for having my linode consuming max CPU for a while. I received this:

> Hello,

Your Linode is consuming an excessive amount of CPU resources which is negatively impacting your neighbors.

Please take appropriate steps to reduce your CPU usage, and update us once you have done so.

Regards

And replied with this:

> Hello,

I have stopped the processes that were using CPU.

But I have to say I'm surprised and a bit disappointed at receiving this. I never got the impression from your website that using CPU is a problem. Indeed you advertise the "1 GB Linode" as having 8 CPU cores at 1x priority.

In general I love your service but I'm not sure the $216 per year will continue to be worth it if I can't run CPU-intensive stuff once in a while.

Best regards

edit - just got this as a reply:

> Greetings,

We ask that if you plan on using CPU intensive tasks for extended periods of time (IE multiple days) that you make every effort to limit the amount of CPU usage as much as possible. Given the nature of the technology you are sharing resources with other customers on your host. When using an excessive amount of CPU, it can negatively impact performance for all other users on the host.

Thank you

Before anyone asks - no, I was not selling or donating CPU time. It was purely for my personal projects.

So what were you doing? I can imagine them asking you to reduce CPU usage if it is affecting others on the host. After all, you are sharing with others. I don't think maxing out is bad, but if you max out that much/often that it affects the others they should ask. If the situation was the opposite (you being negatively affected because of the other people on your host) you would want them to do something about it as well.

@Nuvini:

So what were you doing? I can imagine them asking you to reduce CPU usage if it is affecting others on the host. After all, you are sharing with others. I don't think maxing out is bad, but if you max out that much/often that it affects the others they should ask. If the situation was the opposite (you being negatively affected because of the other people on your host) you would want them to do something about it as well.

I was using the 8 CPU cores that are advertised as part of the plan I purchased. Once in a while I run tests on my software that require a lot of CPU, but I don’t do this every day of the year.

I have been a customer of Linode for almost 5 years and this has never been a problem before. Now suddenly I get a not-so-polite email and a big red abuse ticket on my homepage.

As you can see in this and other threads, several people think you can use as much CPU as you want, and no one from Linode ever corrected them as far as I've seen.

If the situation was the opposite I would not complain, as I realize what a VPS means. I'm OK with my CPU usage getting throttled when other users start using CPU themselves. What I'm not OK with is getting abuse tickets for doing something the rules don't forbid and which has been implicitly allowed since forever.

Doesn't Bitcoin mining basically make you part of a botnet? I was reading about it, and it seemed really sketchy. They use the mining computers to run Bitcoin services. Also, they will apparently will require this even when all Bitcoins have been mined. No one will bother at that point. Only criminal botnets are going to continue to operate Bitcoin services, and that's assuming the criminals don't just sell all their Bitcoins. I thought about mining Bitcoins, but the whole thing seems really sketchy.

There will still be transaction fees that miners receive. That'll make it worthwhile to continue mining.

And no, Bitcoin mining is not being part of a botnet. You can solo mine, given that you have enough hashing power to make it worthwhile.

Remember all the folding@home stuff? It's a bit like that, but now you're not doing it for SETI@Home or medical research but to get bitcoins instead:)

@Inquisitor Sasha:

Doesn't Bitcoin mining basically make you part of a botnet? I was reading about it, and it seemed really sketchy. They use the mining computers to run Bitcoin services. Also, they will apparently will require this even when all Bitcoins have been mined. No one will bother at that point. Only criminal botnets are going to continue to operate Bitcoin services, and that's assuming the criminals don't just sell all their Bitcoins. I thought about mining Bitcoins, but the whole thing seems really sketchy.

BitCoin mining doesn't make you part of a botnet. Bot's are remotely controlled slaves, bitcoin nodes are autonomous and do not allow anyone else to run anything on your machine.

You don't need to mine BitCoin's in order to use them. Mining is being taken over by huge data center outfits and there is little room for small scale operations now. That's not as bad as it sounds because the profit made by mining is meant to decrease over time. Miners will still get paid transaction fees for the transactions they process and the value of those will steadily increase to compensate somewhat. Miners will keep mining for the transaction fees.

The botnet pond-slime may control a few thousand PCs but these are next to useless at BitCoin mining. It's takes specialist hardware before it's even worth the effort.

Here is the original paper on BitCoin. Whether you love, hate, or are undecided about BitCoin it's still interesting reading. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

There are lots of botnets in the hundreds of thousands of PCs, a bunch in the millions, and a few in the tens of millions…