Ajen

It would also hurt their best customers while helping the people who only buy games on sale, which isn’t great for their bottom line.

Besides RAM, what resources do for think you’re saving? Not CPU cycles or IO ops, because you’re processing the same amount of DB queries either way. Not power consumption, since that isn’t affected by RAM utilization. Maybe disc space? But that’s even cheaper than RAM.

Or more importantly: the extent to which you can self-host out of sheer luck and ignorance like you suggest is very limited. If you don’t want to engage with a minimum amount of configuration, you might bump into security issues (a much broader and complex subject) long before any of the above has a material impact.

You’re mischaracterizing what I said. My point is that running multiple DB processes on a server isn’t going to have a significant impact on system load, if all other factor are kept constant.

You seem to be obsessed with optimising one resource at the expense of others. Time is a limited resource, and even if it only takes 5 minutes to configure all of your containers to share a single db backend (it will take longer than that even if you just have 2), you’re only going to save a few MB of RAM. And since RAM costs roughly $2.5/GB (0.25 cents/MB) your time would have to be worth very little for this to be worthwhile.

On the other hand, if you’re doing it to learn more about computers then it might be worthwhile. This is a community of hobbiests, after all…

Neither, I’m trying to explain that you don’t need to know the implementation details of the software running on your server to backup the entire thing.

Where are you getting that from? The fastest and easiest way to back up any server is a full filesystem backup, especially if you’re using something like zfs or btrfs.

I’m saying this based on real world experience: after a certain point you start to see deminishing returns when optimizing a system, and you’re better off focusing your efforts elsewhere. For most applications, customizing containerized services to share databases is far past that point.

Do you have the data to back that up? Have you measured how much of an impact on system load and power consumption having 2 separate DB processes has?

Roughly the same amount of work is being done by the CPU if you split your DBs between 2 servers or just use one. There might be a slight increase in memory usage, but that would only matter in a few niche applications and wouldn’t affect environmental impact.

For most applications the overhead of running a second DB server is negligible.

I write software for a living, and have worked with all 3 database options in the past. I don’t know what DB backend my nextcloud server is using, nor do I care.

I’m not a CPA, but I don’t think you can write off something that already made a profit. How would that even work, if companies were able to write off predicted ad revenue? They could make up any value and never have to pay any taxes at all.

I don’t think write-offs have anything to do with them removing these episodes.

I don’t think they can write it off either way, though. It only makes sense to write off shows that haven’t made money. It’s just “retiring” when you’re taking about something that’s already been released. There’s no ulterior profit motive, unlike when they write off unreleased movies and shows.

What does this have to do with write-offs? I don’t think they can write off episodes of South Park and the daily show that have already aired.