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by threecheese 732 days ago
I am curious about your hosting; the Community plan notes "8 GB RAM - 4 cores "; is there some element to Pathway that is always hosted and would utilize this capacity - even for local deployments? Or is this just "Hey, if you want to play around on Pathway hardware, this is how much you can use"? This looks amazing, and I am wondering where "the rub" is :)
1 comments
dxtrous 732 days ago
The main factor impacting the RAM requirement of the instance is the size of the data that you feed into it, especially if you need an in-memory index. (If you are curious about peak memory use etc., you can profile Pathway memory use in Grafana: https://github.com/pathwaycom/pathway/tree/main/examples/pro....)

One point to clarify is that "Pathway Community" is self-hosted, and the "8GB RAM - 4 cores" value is just a limit on the dimension of your own/cloud machine that the framework will effectively use. Currently, if you would like to get a "free" cloud machine to go with your project, we suggest going for "Pathway Scale" and reaching out through the #Developer Assist link - add a mention that you are interested in cloud credits. You can also go with 3rd party hosting providers like http://render.com/ who have a (somewhat modest) free tier for Docker instances, or reasonably priced ones like fly.io https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/.

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threecheese 732 days ago
That’s a very interesting model, I don’t think I’ve seen that before. Is the rust engine that sits underneath Python shipped as a compiled executable, with a license check/capability limitation? EDIT: there is rust source code in the Pathway repository.

Another edit: there is license checking code in the rust source; it seems fair to ask users of your copyrighted code to abide by your limits, even if they are self-enforced, if that’s the implicit agreement in the sharing of the thing. Objectively.

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dxtrous 730 days ago
It's absolutely great to see you've figured out the details of it! Indeed, the repository comes with a mix of Python and Rust which need to be built together. We trust our users not to re-build the package with altered parameters for production use (given the package build from sources is slightly non-trivial and takes an hour or two, one cannot really get this wrong by accident...). Then, for learning and non-production use, the BSL under which Pathway is distributed, allows you to do almost anything with the code.
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