bitbop.io

Auto-shutdown

bitbop.io periodically checks whether your instance is running and will shut it down if it has not had an active SSH session for 1 hour. This protects you from surprise bills and lowers total compute spend such that you only have to pay for what you use. Note that many tools, including VSCode, maintain SSH connection(s) when connected.

If you would like to temporarily disable auto-shutdown, eg to complete a training run, you can use keep alive.

Keep-alive

You can use the //keepalive command to temporarily disable auto-shutdown. Running eg

ssh bitbop.io //keepalive 4.5h

will disable auto-shutdown for 4.5 hours. You can use

ssh bitbop.io //keepalive

to check how much time is left on your current keep-alive, and

ssh bitbop.io //keepalive unset

to unset any active keep-alive timer.

Example keep-alive workflow

Let's say we have a script train.py that we estimate to take 6 hours to complete. We'd like to set it up to run overnight. We can use the following example workflow:

1. Start a tmux session.
2. Launch python3 train.py ; sudo shutdown +30 to run train.py and then shut down the instance 30 minutes after train.py completes. By adding a 30 minute buffer, we give ourselves time to recover should train.py fail. Note that you can cancel the shutdown with sudo shutdown -c.
3. Detach from the tmux session with Ctrl-b d. This will keep the tmux session running in the background, including any process running in the tmux session.
4. Run ssh bitbop.io //keepalive 7h to disable auto-shutdown for 7 hours. By setting the keep-alive longer than the expected runtime, we ensure that the instance will not shut down before train.py completes.