Hi, this isn’t a severe issue right now, but it looks like an org I’m with is billing at $0.14 so far this month. We’re running 2 Next apps and 2 .NET apis but they’re essentially idle. I guess my question is, do our idle apps cost us compute power? Is there an effective way of optimizing idle apps automatically?
Hi @Oops365
Yes, idle apps do cost you compute power. Furthermore, billing is done on provisioned use, so even if you’ve got 10 instances with 0% CPU usage, you’ll still be paying for the CPU allocated to those instances.
e.g. you have 2 dedicated-cpu-1x instances running, even if they are permanently at 0% CPU, you’ll still be paying for the 2 vCPUs allocated for your instances.
If you’re using instances covered by the free tier then most likely the CPU usage isn’t whats costing you, its more likely to be the bandwidth. An idle app that uses almost no CPU but is constantly sending or receiving data can quite quickly rack up a bandwidth bill.
Take a look at your billing page in the Fly dashboard to see what items are being charged for.
Thanks for the quick reply!
184330 second × VM: Shared CPU (Tier 2 at $0.00000075 / month)
That’s the line in the dashboard, I assume that means it is CPU? (We’re running 4 apps, overview looks really similar for all of them: monitor is 18B/s in 10B/s out, average mem is 180MB for the apis and 190MB for the next apps, Average Load 0.07).
There’s one instance that I could just force to scale 0 for most of the month, guessing that’s the best option for now.
As mentioned, it’s not a crazy amount ($0.16 now), but I was concerned somewhat about what costs will look like when usage increases. However from what you’ve told me, we’re already paying for the compute power, so it’s just bandwidth that we’d have to worry about, is that correct? Or would our cpu billing increase with usage as well.
Totally missed that you had 4 instances total running, that would be where the charge is coming from as you only get 3 free instances (see Fly App Pricing · Fly Docs - Hobby Plan).
In regards to compute power, you don’t pay extra for your cpu usage spiking/increasing as you pay for whats allocated (see Fly App Pricing · Fly Docs - Virtual Machines for cpu pricing).
In regards to bandwidth, yes this is the one to look out for as it’s a variable charge that isn’t provisioned, so you’re not for example paying a for 10Mbps connection, you’re paying for the total outbound data transferred from your instances. You do however get a free allocation which should cover small apps that aren’t doing much (see Fly App Pricing · Fly Docs - Outbound data transfer)
1 Like