
Show HN: Sick of running random cron jobs, I built a small Keepalive for my FaaS - lwilld
https://stayingalive.vessels.tech/
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chatmasta
If you need to keep your function "warm," why are you using FaaS in the first
place? This almost seems like serverless satire!

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ezekg
I don’t understand this either. What’s the point of going serverless with
something like Lambda if you’re treating it like a regular old EC2 instance
with more overhead? Is it cheaper or something?

~~~
stephenr
I'm pretty sure the "point" is "I drank the koolaid. Turns out I have diabetes
and can't have that much sugar but fuck it insulin injections work so pass the
koolaid bro"

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magnetic
I'm afraid I don't understand the purpose of this. Are there servers that die
if you don't hit their URLs periodically? I use uptimerobot for my servers but
it serves a different purpose.

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bdcravens
For FaaS (like Lambda), if a function hasn't been hit in a while, it'll be
cold started when it is needed next. (Even though it's "serverless" behind the
scenes they're likely containers that stay up for a little while to handle
subsequent requests; a cold start means there's overhead of starting up the
container)

A hack to keep your function warm is to call it via cron or a service like
this.

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NetStrikeForce
404 and invalid cert :-/

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busymichael
I get it. Well done!

I had the same problem when I first launched
[https://dndemail.com](https://dndemail.com). Traffic was low and if no one
uses the service for an hour or so, the first load in the app was slow.

I built a once a minute Cron to keep the app warm and initial requests quick.

Now I have enough traffic that I don't worry about the problem.

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barna
Why once a minute?

