Hi Folks,
We are doing some testing on the emacspeak mailing list virtual machine.
In the worst case this testing might cause a reboot. We will of course try
to avoid that outcome, but we wanted to give you all a heads up in case
that does happen and you notice the system disappears for a few minutes.
Again, we do not anticipate an unplanned reboot, but we wanted to let you
know that it might happen. If you do notice the system is not responding
for 10 minutes or more, please write to me directly.
That's it. But if you want to know more here is what is going on:
We originally brought up
emacspeak.org as a virtual system with one gig of
ram. In 2021 we had some issues with the system reporting it was short on
memory. At that time we doubled what it was allocated from one to two gigs
of ram. This eliminated the issues we were seeing but had the side effect
of doubling the monthly cost for the host. We have since tried a few
things and we have reduced its memory footprint. Now we will be testing
to see if the system will run happily again on just one gig of ram.
The plan is to create a ramdisk, and slowly increase its size monitoring
for any issues. So over the next few weeks we will be running it with a
reduced amount of available ram. If we can get to a simulated maximum of
one gig of ram, then we will leave it there for a few weeks and continue to
monitor.
The testing might itself cause some problems. If there are any, we should
be able to free up the blocked memory. But there is a chance we may need
to reboot the system to fully restore things. If so, we want to do that
without much warning. There is also a very small chance the system could
reboot itself. A reboot will cause it to revert to its full amount of
ram. If either of these types of reboots happen, the system would be
offline for just a few minutes.
If all goes well and the system is running happily when restricted to one
gig of ram, then we will schedule a migration back to a one gig
configuration. That will of course be announced here before it happens.
More when we know more,
Greg