Hi everyone,
Just wanted to share an update regarding the free accounts, of which we disabled the possibility to create them as of yesterday. As this thread shows, we've been offering these free accounts since september 2020, over more than four years. We've done this for three reasons:
1: Test PBS
2: Give something back to the community
3: Marketing, obviously. We're still a professional company trying to make some money.
Since september 2020, our fleet of PBS'es have grown from a single server to eight. And the number of non-paying users is far beyond 2000. We've been able to manage the (manual) workload by incorporating creation of accounts into our new portal, so that's doable (although about 3 times per day, users fill their datastores completely, requiring our intervention).
The amount of storage that these users use, is not really an issue. If all the users would fill up their datastore completely, it would be about 300Tb, that doesn't scare us. What IS an issue though, is performance for active users.
We see two issues there:
1: Verify-jobs. Everyone wants to see a green checked-icon next to their backup. Even though we use ZFS and verifies are pretty much useless, the amount of IO this causes is enourmous. For non-paying users, we circumvented this by implementing
https://support.tuxis.nl/en/knowled...garbage-collection-jobs-for-free-pbs-accounts
2: PBS was not built for large amounts of datastores and accounts. The amount of requests we handle, without any running tasks, exceeds 250 requests per second on a single server. These are authentication and datastore-status-requests. About 800% of CPU-power is required to handle just those requests.
We've created
https://bugzilla.proxmox.com/show_bug.cgi?id=6049 for that.
We've decided to disable creation of free accounts, until we see bug 6049 fixed and the load on our PBS'es lowered, to prevent our paying customers to experience performance issues.
So this is the time to let Open Source shine. If you are able to code in Rust (we're not), dive into bug 6049 and help the Proxmox Team in their efforts to create these cool products.
Please note, that we do *not* feel that this is a problem in PBS. AFAIC the way we are deploying PBS is (far) from the normal situation that PBS runs in.