[IPython-dev] Easy Installation

[Fernando Perez]

On Sun, Jun 10, 2012 at 6:06 PM, Carl Smith <carl.input at gmail.com> wrote:
> I did try this, but it racks up a lot of requests if you leave it open
> for a while and you do pay for them if there's loads. I think you get
> 10,000 a month on the Free Tier, but that isn't that many at one every
> 10 seconds. As you suggested, it needs to just do it when there's
> something pending, then settle down when all is quiet. The problem is
> that refreshing the page refreshes the namespace, so you can't modify
> the time between each refresh easily. I'm thinking about how to solve
> that??

Ah, got it.  I didn't realize this would happen.  It should be
possilbe with javascript to have an expiring refresh, that is called
periodically but times out after  a bit.  It can also use a mild
exponential backoff scheme.  With that in place and a 1hour timeout,
you can guarantee that no more than a few dozen requests are generated
per requested instance.

> The AWS console always hogs all my RAM. It's not good. I upgraded to
> the new look. Now, it looks nice, but still runs like jam.

I have to say, from our recent experience with Azure, this is one area
where Microsoft is miles ahead of Amazon: the azure console is a
pleasure to work with, lightweight, pretty and functional.  Granted
Amazon has many more services so it's not a totally fair comparison,
but I've seen few things on the modern web worse than the horror
Amazon managed to cook up, and none from a market leader.  I thank
Justin Riley for Starcluster every time I use Amazon stuff, because I
very rarely have to deal with their disaster directly.

>> You could offer the option for the user to register an EBS disk they
>> have access to and mount it as the home directory for the notebook.
>> That way they don't have to pay for the instance being stored, only
>> for their own data.  And it also means they can use `!pip install
>> --user` to add local packages stored in their user area and that is
>> persisted too.
>
> I have to be honest, you lost me a bit here. I'll have to do a bit of
> homework and get back to you. It sounds like an awesome idea, I'm just
> not sure how to do it. I might be back for some advice on that one.

I'm not an expert, but from what little I understand about AWS, this
should be pretty easy to do.

Best,

f