hi folks.
How do I tell what is causing a sprite to keep running?
I get that sprites stop running once they are idle and after around 30 seconds of activity, but I can’t see where that shows up, because when I create sprites the only way I can seem to see a sprite as ‘cold’ (which I assume to mean “stored in object storage with minimal low billing”), is by creating a sprite.
Let’s say have these here:
sprite ls
Sprites in organization chris-adams-286:
┌────────────────┬───────┬───────┐
│ NAME │STATUS │CREATED│
├────────────────┼───────┼───────┤
│short-lived-vm │running│ 2h ago│
│short-lived-vm-1│cold │ 1m ago│
│short-lived-vm-2│cold │21s ago│
└────────────────┴───────┴───────┘
Total: 3 sprite(s)
And try creating a sprite:
sprite create -skip-console short-lived-vm-3 2>&1 > output.log
I’m passing in skip-console to return, and I’m redirecting the output with 2>&1 > output.log in the hope of capturing briefly shows on screen before it disappears
I can now see the new sprite in a cold / asleep state
sprite ls
Sprites in organization chris-adams-286:
┌────────────────┬───────┬───────┐
│ NAME │STATUS │CREATED│
├────────────────┼───────┼───────┤
│short-lived-vm │running│ 2h ago│
│short-lived-vm-1│running│ 9m ago│
│short-lived-vm-2│cold │ 8m ago│
│short-lived-vm-3│cold │20s ago│
└────────────────┴───────┴───────┘
Total: 4 sprite(s)
Thing is as soon as I try ANY command, it seems to wake the VM up, and I don’t see a way to get it back into a cold state.
Let’s try a super simple command invocation that you would expect to leave the machine ready to sleep when done
sprite exec --sprite short-lived-vm-3 -- pwd
# output was this:
/home/sprite
Now, for the rest of the life of that sprite it shows as running.
sprite ls
Sprites in organization chris-adams-286:
┌────────────────┬───────┬───────┐
│ NAME │STATUS │CREATED│
├────────────────┼───────┼───────┤
│short-lived-vm │running│ 3h ago│
│short-lived-vm-1│running│15m ago│
│short-lived-vm-2│cold │13m ago│
│short-lived-vm-3│running│ 6m ago│
└────────────────┴───────┴───────┘
Total: 4 sprite(s)
Is this the expected behaviour?
Update: since writing this, post I’ve found the https://docs.sprites.dev sirte which at the time of writing is behind an password but last night for me, it wasn’t.
I was able to check out the repo here of the code:
And I can see the development is further ahead than the docs, so I’m assuming that it’s probably wisest to come back in a few days, after the docs and CLI have stabilised somewhat.
This is a really_ cool project though, I’m excited about using it later in 2026 