OK, and compared to what? "Less" is a comparison, but you didn't specify what you're comparing Debian to.
Out-of-the-box RAM usage is a pretty specious metric because you're not installing Debian (or any other OS) just to have sit there in its out-of-the-box condition. Do you think a Debian server running Apache with 1000 vhosts will use less RAM than a RHEL server running nginx with 10 vhosts?
Debian uses like 200MBs of ram for a basic fresh install. That’s negligible.
Unless you’re deploying 500 virtual machines on a single server, that all run a single simple basic task the base ram usage of the OS shouldn’t even be a factor.
I think this is a fairly common use case. Maybe not the most common, but I’ve definitely seen this at multiple shops.
Density of RAM on hosts is often a limiting factor for scaling. Not every app is CPU hungry. Some just need to be available, and running a whole is for isolation is the way it’s done in a lot of shops.
I don’t really subscribe to Arch or Debian being better or worse than each other. I encounter issues just as frequently on both. Maybe it’s a little harder to do things in Debian because the repositories don’t update as often but the AUR is where a lot of important stuff is and that’s a pain to deal with too.
Moving our naemon/thruk/pnp instance to omd. I need to figure out how to manage it with ansible and add our own authentication. Otherwise I hope it is easier to maintain.
I will add that, as a manager, when my team had on-call, I did not mind if my team member wanted to “work” the next day to min/max their compensation; but I sure as hell made sure they didn’t have any production access if they report in sleep deprived.
I’ve been 24x7 on call since the '90s. The only time I haven’t been on call in that whole range is when I’m on a plane or I’m somewhere that has no service. I’ve replaced a bank of data servers from a campground, I fixed crippling production problems from an airplane.
Unfortunately the answer to your question relies mainly on your personal ability to fall asleep. And your ability to stay asleep.
From the time where you’re actually under you need about 45 minutes to do any good sleep cycle wise. If you don’t make it to REM it does you no good mentally. Making it an hour and a half is my personal minimum optimal. It should always be somewhere around a multiple of 45 minutes, obviously it gets front padded by how long it takes you to fall asleep.
I’ll take an hour and a half over nothing. I can sleep in full daylight, I can sleep during thunderstorms tornadoes incredible amounts of sound around no problem.
Depending on the status of whatever I dealt with at night, I’ll either take the rest of my time in the morning or at night. Usually if I was up till 4:00 fixing something I need to be up at 9:00 when people start coming in to make sure it’s okay. I’ll either take a few hours at lunch or cut off early for the day. I don’t mind missing a few hours of sleep here and there but if it drags on for more than a couple of days I eventually have to pay the piper.
I do have another really weird sleep thing though. If it’s late and I’m driving and I’m starting to doze. If I pull over somewhere and sleep for 15 minutes, when the alarm goes off I no longer have the uncontrollable urge to doze off. It doesn’t do anything for my mental acuity. It doesn’t make me feel rested. It just clears that insatiable need to close my eyes and shut down, at least for a few more hours.
I was going to say the same about the 15 minute doze while driving, but add that the same works at work for me. There will
Be times when I am reading the same paragraph 4 times and I will know it is time for me to book a meeting room for 30 minutes.
Lie on the floor, set an alarm for 15 minutes, out like a light. Very restorative.
If I get a call at 345, and resolve it at 0430, you will NOT see me before 1230. You will pay me from 0800-1700 but you will not see me tomorrow until lunch.
Name the thing that is so important I must work on it in the morning while sleep-impaired.
Usually a junior will pick up the problem ticket in the morning, and collab with a senior if it’s a non-trivial fix. Soon as the workaround’s in and the incident can close, the overnight nerd is back to bed and the 8 hours timer starts.
I hate with a passion whoever you work for. I don’t know you, I don’t know them but I have a dislike for them that rivals the heat of the sun in the south on a day in mid July.
You’re giving up your sleep, and by extension your health, to make someone else richer.
You should be pushing that you get the entire day off. And when your manager denies it, and they will because this doesn’t sound like a one-off emergency, insist that you need to call them and wake them up each and every time. If it truly is an emergency, they will be glad that you are keeping them in the loop. When it’s not (and it almost never is), they need to champion your need to make it stop.
Everyone involved needs to feel the pain for the harm they are causing.
It sounds like you’ve got a good manager, so hopefully they won’t hold that against you. This is the reality of oncall - it sucks!
When you get woken up in the middle of the night, of course you’re going to be more tired the next day. I’m the same as you - I can’t fall back asleep if its early morning so I normally just stay awake and am tired that day. You shouldn’t feel guilty for being at 1/2 capacity after working all night to solve your employer’s problems!
Yeah my manager is sympathetic to it because they also have to do on call on the roster. So they know the pain of getting up at those hours of the morning. I think based on the information in this thread I have a good strategy for this.
Sorry to say I don’t have any good answers about this. When midnight on-call calls became a fairly regular occurrence for me, I quit my job to go somewhere it wouldn’t be any significant issue.
But if it helps, I’ve always gone back to bed after a call and laid there trying to fall asleep until either I fell asleep and got a little bit of extra sleep or my alarm went off and I had to work. I always felt like crap when I did, but I doubt I’d have felt any less bad had I stayed up instead. My theory was that even if staying up might be preferable at the time, going back to bed, even if I only got an hour of sleep, would be better for me (at least in terms of not shortening my lifespan as much) in the long run.
(Full disclosure, I’m a coder, not a sysadmin, but they were taking DevOps pretty seriously, so I was on call for the applications my team maintained.)
Mmm I guess it’s a give and take scenario with the lifespan analogy. I think I feel more useless to the business as I sit there feeling ever so much more tired throughout the workday and the struggle to focus increases throughout the day. Thanks for the input!
I didn’t intend for the “lifespan” bit to be an analogy. I meant that sleep deprivation will literally shorten one’s life. Especially if it’s a frequent occurrence. When it comes to things like 3:00am calls, I’ll prioritize my health over my usefulness to the business any day.
For me I’ve done plenty of shifts where I got paged, slept or didn’t sleep and then worked a full day.
But at this point, if I go back to sleep, I won’t set an alarm, because I see no value in going to work like a zombie. If I end up at work but can’t focus because I was upnall night with he pager, I’ll just hit my couple meetings and call it. No point in sitting around pretending to work.
Linode has been ok for me. I wouldn’t use their managed services. If you need that type of scale go to AWS.
One cool thing I experienced with linode yesterday is I could boot from one of their kernels instead of my own grub kernel. I had a bad update on alma9 and this made recovery much easier without having to rebuild the node.
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