|
![](/i/fill.gif) |
>> Right. So if you turn on an instance and it doesn't do anything, it
>> will still cost you hundreds of dollars per month?
>
> 72 dollars a month, roughly. Why would you turn it on and not have it
> do something? The point of being able to turn it on and off is to run
> it only when you have something for it to do.
If you want to use it just for yourself, sure. If you want it to provide
a service to other people... well, no way to know when those service
requests will arrive, eh?
> If you want to serve static web pages, use S3, not EC2.
S3 only stores data. There's no way of accessing it from the outside
world again. (As far as I can tell.)
I'd actually like to run custom CGI. But paying 72$/month for a server
that gets maybe 4 hits per month seems... excessive.
>> Faster than my current dual-core AMD Athlon64 X2 4200+ 2.2 GHz with
>> brass knobs on.
>
> No. Probably slower than that at the low end, potentially faster than
> that at the high end. ("Low end" being the $0.10/hour and high end being
> $0.80/hour.)
>
> On the other hand, you can turn it on, run it for three hours to do the
> render, and turn it off again.
Three hours does not concern me. I have an animation running that's
likely to take about a week to render. But it'll take way longer if I
can only have the machine turned on for a few hours a day. (Especially
since POV-Ray takes about 30 minutes JUST TO FIGURE OUT WHERE IT LEFT OFF!!)
>> The advantage of a virtual machine, of course, is that it can run
>> overnight.
>
> Yep. And turn off when it's done. Just remember to save the output.
>
> I have code for managing all this I haven't packaged up elegantly, but
> that's what it's intended for.
Looks like you'd need to script it to run POV-Ray, run VirtualDub,
somehow copy the data to S3, and then automatically shut down ASAP
before you go bankrupt!
The more I look at this, the more infeasible it looks.
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
Post a reply to this message
|
![](/i/fill.gif) |