notabot

I’ve found Hetzner to be reasonable for VPSs and even bare metal servers, especially if you keep an eye on their auctions.

Whether you’re hosting it all at home, all on a remote server, or some combination of the two, it’s worth taking the time to first learn some form of automation tooling, so that your setup is reproducible and you know exactly how everything is set up. From the first time you have to rebuild everything due to a hardware failure trashing your server, or a careless rm -rf, you’ll be glad of it.

Ansible is a good place to start as it’s pretty straighforward to get going, and your playbook can grow with your requirements. If you’re using a lot of containers, make sure you understand docker, and maybe consider Kubenetes, especially if you want to split your workload across servers.

I find that a dedicated RSS reader is a much better experience, as, especially when you’ve got a lot if feeds, organising them and keeping track of what you’ve read becomes quite important. If you take your eye off of a chat based system, you’re going to have so many unread messages it’ll be hard to keep up.

The cache usage being higher on a server than a laptop seems fairly likely as more disk accesses are occurring. When data is loaded from disk, the linux kernel will keep it in memory even after the original requester is done with it, on the principal that it might need it again. This is the cache you’re seeing. If the kernel detects high memory utilisation it will free cache pages before anything else, so you actually want to see near 100% memory utilisation all the time, as it means fewer accesses to disk.

The swap usage is harder to diagnose without more detailed diagnostic work, but you can see from the graph you posted that, even what swap is being used, you have a little free memory. This may well be the kernel preemptively moving little used memory pages to the swap cache so tgat they can be evicted from memory quickly if needed. You could investigate thus by adjusting the ‘swapiness’ value closer to 0, to see if that delays the swap usage and reduces the peak.

Seeing high cache and buffer numbers is usually a good sign, as it means the system is making full use of the memory you have. It’ll automatically deallocate it if something actually needs the memory, but until then it’s using it to store data you might need.

Swap’s a funny one, and whilst you can tune it to an astonishing degree, the decisions the kernel makes aren’t always what you’d want. With this little actual memory usage, compared to the installed RAM, you might be able to run without swap at all, unless you want something like hibernate. If you want to test that, you can run (as root) swapoff -a, which should disable all swap devices, pushing needed pages back in to RAM, but only until you reboot. If it’s stable, you can consider removing the swap partition(s) later.

It gets interesting if one, or both, sides invent a stasis system, so you don’t have one multi-generational, but probably multi subject, conversation, but each “generation” having a conversation like that, and going in to stasis while waiting for a response. People would have to find a way to communicate between generations as well as with the aliens.

Including the URL isn’t to act as a check on the contents of the QR code, but to act as an alternative for those who don’t want to scan it at all.

The problem is “cuteness” is very much in the eye of the beholder for things like this, and I’m with neatchee here, it’s not cute, and it makes it basically unshareable, and hence unusable in a lot of contexts. I appreciate the effort that’s gone into the project, but the name and publicity massively detract from that.