From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.2 (2018-09-13) on inbox.vuxu.org X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.0 required=5.0 tests=HEADER_FROM_DIFFERENT_DOMAINS, MAILING_LIST_MULTI,RCVD_IN_DNSWL_NONE autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.2 Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (minnie.tuhs.org [45.79.103.53]) by inbox.vuxu.org (OpenSMTPD) with ESMTP id 2929cb73 for ; Fri, 31 May 2019 19:14:25 +0000 (UTC) Received: by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix, from userid 112) id A59989B877; Sat, 1 Jun 2019 05:14:23 +1000 (AEST) Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id CE8A89B680; Sat, 1 Jun 2019 05:14:06 +1000 (AEST) Received: by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix, from userid 112) id 23ECE9B680; Sat, 1 Jun 2019 05:14:04 +1000 (AEST) X-Greylist: delayed 400 seconds by postgrey-1.36 at minnie.tuhs.org; Sat, 01 Jun 2019 05:14:03 AEST Received: from mail.nomadlogic.org (mail.nomadlogic.org [174.136.98.114]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 89FCC9B67F for ; Sat, 1 Jun 2019 05:14:03 +1000 (AEST) Received: from [192.168.1.206] (cpe-23-243-162-239.socal.res.rr.com [23.243.162.239]) by mail.nomadlogic.org (OpenSMTPD) with ESMTPSA id 63b7b5fa TLS version=TLSv1.2 cipher=ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 bits=128 verify=NO; Fri, 31 May 2019 19:07:23 +0000 (UTC) To: david@kdbarto.org, The Eunuchs Hysterical Society References: <975B93B6-AD7C-41B5-A14D-2DE4FEFAD3A6@kdbarto.org> From: Pete Wright Message-ID: <78485efd-2cd3-a290-8142-48672bb847c5@nomadlogic.org> Date: Fri, 31 May 2019 12:07:22 -0700 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; FreeBSD amd64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/60.7.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <975B93B6-AD7C-41B5-A14D-2DE4FEFAD3A6@kdbarto.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Language: en-US Subject: Re: [TUHS] Quotas - did anyone ever use them? X-BeenThere: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.26 Precedence: list List-Id: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org Sender: "TUHS" On 5/30/19 6:49 AM, David wrote: > I think it was BSD 4.1 that added quotas to the disk system, and I was just wondering if anyone ever used them, in academia or industry. As a user and an admin I never used this and, while I thought it was interesting, just figured that the users would sort it out amongst themselves. Which they mostly did. > > So, anyone ever use this feature? Lots of interesting insights/stories on this thread so figured i'd throw my hat in the ring and share a business anecdote... For quite a while i worked in the special effects/animation industry where fortunately (for me) unix has a long and interesting history. One secret abut the VFX world is that it's tremendously expensive with relatively little financial upside.  in my experience it is the studios who get most of the residual income from a blockbuster feature.  also a crew for a AAA feature requires lots of human power, computers and storage.  my shop frequently had 3-5 features in full production mode at the same time so we were redlining all of our systems 24/7. So aside from the cost of maintaining a large renderfarm, unix/linux 3d workstations, editing bays etc we also had an enormous NetApp footprint to support all these systems.  Now artists love creating lots and lots of high resolution images, and if they had their way there were be unlimited storage so they'd never have to archive a shot to tape in the event they need to reference it later.  But obviously that's not reasonable from a financial perspective. Our solution was to make heavy use of storage quotas in our environment, and then leverage quotas to provide per-department billing.  An individual user was given something like 1GB by default (here they had their mailbox, source-code, scripts etc), then the show they were booked on was then given an allocation of say 1TB of storage.  The show would then carve out this allocation in a per-shot basis.  This allowed us as an organization to actually keep pretty detailed records on our costs and unfortunately isn't something I've seen replicated well at lots of startups flush with cash these days. I was briefly on the team responsible for managing these quotas for a show and it was seriously an around the clock operation to keep our disks from filling up.  One of the tricks was to figure out how much space a rendered sequence of images would consume, factor in the time-to-render a frame and attempt to line up your backup jobs to free up enough space so the render nodes could write out the images to NFS. -pete -- Pete Wright pete@nomadlogic.org @nomadlogicLA