Cloudron makes it easy to run web apps like WordPress, Nextcloud, GitLab on your server. Find out more or install now.


  • Categories
  • Recent
  • Tags
  • Popular
  • Bookmarks
Skins
  • Light
  • Cerulean
  • Cosmo
  • Flatly
  • Journal
  • Litera
  • Lumen
  • Lux
  • Materia
  • Minty
  • Morph
  • Pulse
  • Sandstone
  • Simplex
  • Sketchy
  • Spacelab
  • United
  • Yeti
  • Zephyr
  • Dark
  • Cyborg
  • Darkly
  • Quartz
  • Slate
  • Solar
  • Superhero
  • Vapor

  • Default (No Skin)
  • No Skin
Collapse

Cloudron Forum

Apps | Demo | Docs | Install

Please randomize time-of-day for certificate renewal

Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Solved Feature Requests
6 Posts 3 Posters 336 Views
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
Reply
  • Reply as topic
Log in to reply
This topic has been deleted. Only users with topic management privileges can see it.
  • M Offline
    M Offline
    mcpherrinm
    wrote on last edited by
    #1

    I work at Let's Encrypt, which Cloudron uses to issue certificates per its documentation. We've identified that Cloudron disproportionately sends traffic at midnight and noon UTC. I suspect this is the automated renewal noted in Cloudron's documentation.

    Let's Encrypt receives disproportionately high amounts of traffic at midnight UTC in particular, as well as the top of other hours. I'm attempting to find software which hardcodes these times to ask the developers to have them renew at a random time of day.

    Would it be possible to have cloudron renew at a random time of day? If so, is there an update mechanism that would allow existing clients to install this fix?

    Thank you in advance,

    Matthew McPherrin
    Let's Encrypt Site Reliability Engineering

    1 Reply Last reply
    9
  • nebulonN Online
    nebulonN Online
    nebulon Staff
    wrote on last edited by
    #2

    Hi @mcpherrinm thanks for bringing this up. I guess we haven't thought Cloudron became that popular to spread load a bit over time. Currently you can see the hardcoded cron schedule for cert renewal checker at https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/box/-/blob/master/src/cron.js#L118

    We will make this randomized for the next release then.

    1 Reply Last reply
    13
  • nebulonN nebulon marked this topic as a question on
  • M Offline
    M Offline
    mcpherrinm
    wrote on last edited by
    #3

    Thank you for promptly addressing this!

    It’s not just cloudron but many pieces of software all making the same decision to renew at midnight, which leads to uneven traffic.

    robiR 1 Reply Last reply
    5
  • robiR Offline
    robiR Offline
    robi
    replied to mcpherrinm on last edited by
    #4

    @mcpherrinm How long does the midnight spike last?

    How do you enjoy tracking these down? 🙂

    Life of sky tech

    M 1 Reply Last reply
    3
  • M Offline
    M Offline
    mcpherrinm
    replied to robi on last edited by
    #5

    The peak of the spike is about 20 seconds long, where we are returning some errors due to overload. Traffic is elevated for a few more minutes.

    Tracking down the spikes is a little fun, though sometimes quite tricky. Cloudron was straightforward because it supplies a distinct user agent, which not all clients do.

    1 Reply Last reply
    8
  • nebulonN Online
    nebulonN Online
    nebulon Staff
    wrote on last edited by
    #6

    Alright with https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/box/-/commit/5b4a1e0ec12554f7a4f1099bfc94d041abfca5f5 we now generate a random hour per Cloudron which acts as a seed to spread the instances over 24h.

    1 Reply Last reply
    10
  • nebulonN nebulon has marked this topic as solved on

  • Login

  • Don't have an account? Register

  • Login or register to search.
  • First post
    Last post
0
  • Categories
  • Recent
  • Tags
  • Popular
  • Bookmarks
  • Login

  • Don't have an account? Register

  • Login or register to search.