[IPython-dev] Easy Installation

[Carl Smith]

Thank you very much Fernando, I'm really pleased you like it.

> One suggestion: add a hidden force-refresh tag to the page so that it
> refreshes status when starting instances, say every 10s.  I assumed it
> would and it took me a while to realize I had to manually refresh the
> page to see the instance was up and running

I did try this, but it racks up a lot of requests if you leave it open
for a while and you do pay for them if there's loads. I think you get
10,000 a month on the Free Tier, but that isn't that many at one every
10 seconds. As you suggested, it needs to just do it when there's
something pending, then settle down when all is quiet. The problem is
that refreshing the page refreshes the namespace, so you can't modify
the time between each refresh easily. I'm thinking about how to solve
that??

> Yes, those are pretty high priority to make it self contained.  With
> starcluster I never go to the (god-awful) AWS web interface, so it
> would be nice not to have to visit that interface with your tool
> either.

The AWS console always hogs all my RAM. It's not good. I upgraded to
the new look. Now, it looks nice, but still runs like jam.

> You could offer the option for the user to register an EBS disk they
> have access to and mount it as the home directory for the notebook.
> That way they don't have to pay for the instance being stored, only
> for their own data.  And it also means they can use `!pip install
> --user` to add local packages stored in their user area and that is
> persisted too.

I have to be honest, you lost me a bit here. I'll have to do a bit of
homework and get back to you. It sounds like an awesome idea, I'm just
not sure how to do it. I might be back for some advice on that one.

Thanks again

Carl