Idle Projects

To help handle the load of our users, and to help them save on compute costs (Pro tier), we currently default to putting idle projects to sleep, by default after 30 minutes of very low activity.

By activity we mean both:

• CPU load of the project over a 30 minute window. The load is increased when a project receives traffic (for example, traffic to an API endpoint for an axum server, or calling the commands of a Discord bot). An HTTP server (eg. axum or rocket), will need about 2 requests per minute over the idle-time period to be considered active, a Discord bot will need about 6 calls per minute.
• User interaction, for example running cargo shuttle status or any other CLI commands that interact with the deployed service.

If the project is sleeping, traffic to the project or user interaction will wake it, and this usually takes around one second.

Important: If a Discord bot is sleeping due to inactivity, calling the bot commands will not wake it, only developer interaction through the CLI will (but traffic will keep it from going to sleep). See the below instructions for how to increase the idle limit.

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Configuring the timeout

Since we don’t really want to restrict active users yet, this limit can be freely modified. You can change it by passing in a flag when creating or restarting a project:

cargo shuttle project start --idle-minutes 40

If you pass in --idle-minutes 0 the idle timeout will be disabled and your project will never sleep. This is especially useful for Discord bots, since they will not be awoken by traffic (people using the bot commands in a Discord channel), only by developer interaction through the Shuttle CLI.

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Checking the timeout

You can check the current idle timeout of a project with:

cargo shuttle project status