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Show HN: Sick of running random cron jobs, I built a small Keepalive for my FaaS

stayingalive.vessels.tech

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Re: Show HN: Sick of running random cron jobs, I built a small Keepalive for my FaaS

#3

Post by bdcravens »

magnetic wrote: post #2

I'm afraid I don't understand the purpose of this. Are there servers that die if you don't hit their URLs periodically? I use uptimerobot for my servers but it serves a different purpose.

For FaaS (like Lambda), if a function hasn't been hit in a while, it'll be cold started when it is needed next. (Even though it's "serverless" behind the scenes they're likely containers that stay up for a little while to handle subsequent requests; a cold start means there's overhead of starting up the container)

A hack to keep your function warm is to call it via cron or a service like this.

Re: Show HN: Sick of running random cron jobs, I built a small Keepalive for my FaaS

#6

Post by ezekg »

chatmasta wrote: post #5

If you need to keep your function "warm," why are you using FaaS in the first place? This almost seems like serverless satire!

I don’t understand this either. What’s the point of going serverless with something like Lambda if you’re treating it like a regular old EC2 instance with more overhead? Is it cheaper or something?

Re: Show HN: Sick of running random cron jobs, I built a small Keepalive for my FaaS

#7

Post by busymichael »

I get it. Well done!

I had the same problem when I first launched https://dndemail.com. Traffic was low and if no one uses the service for an hour or so, the first load in the app was slow.

I built a once a minute Cron to keep the app warm and initial requests quick.

Now I have enough traffic that I don't worry about the problem.

Re: Show HN: Sick of running random cron jobs, I built a small Keepalive for my FaaS

#8

Post by stephenr »

ezekg wrote: post #6
chatmasta wrote: post #5

If you need to keep your function "warm," why are you using FaaS in the first place? This almost seems like serverless satire!

I don’t understand this either. What’s the point of going serverless with something like Lambda if you’re treating it like a regular old EC2 instance with more overhead? Is it cheaper or something?

I'm pretty sure the "point" is "I drank the koolaid. Turns out I have diabetes and can't have that much sugar but fuck it insulin injections work so pass the koolaid bro"
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