Drawing down Cloud Credits with a static page deployment

Questions
,
1

If I create a new notebook in the WPC with one cell

$CloudCreditsAvailable

I can evaluate that cell until my heart’s content and it does not change. Then, if I deploy it as a static published page, opening that page once, and returning to the WPC interface, evaluating the cell will cause my cloud credits to decrease. I can go to the dashboard and make the deployment of this page inactive, at which point I can no longer use the URL to open the static published page; however evaluating the cell in the WPC interface still draws down credits. Only when I close the WPC interface and reopen the notebook (I do not have to actually log out) am I able to evaluate the cell without it affecting my cloud credit balance.

The immediate question is: is this expected/anticipated behavior? Is there a reason why publishing a page that I’m currently editing result in credit draw down?

The bigger issue I have is how cloud credit use is applied. I am very hesitant to move from using the CDF plugin for deployments because I can’t forecast the amount of credits a deployment is going to utilize. Any ideas or insights would be welcome.

2

Bob,

two objects evaluated in the desktop frontend create objects in the cloud:

obj1 = CloudDeploy[APIFunction[{}, DateList[] &]]

obj2 = CloudDeploy[
  Manipulate[
   ContourPlot3D[
    x^2 + y^2 + a z^3 == 1, {x, -2, 2}, {y, -2, 2}, {z, -2, 2}, 
    Mesh -> None], {a, -2, 2}]]

Click on every resulting link once ,wait and don’s pull the slider in the contourplot. Now check the Calls and credits used:

In[9]:= CloudLoggingData[CloudObject[obj1]]["TotalCalls"]

Out[9]= <|"LastHour" -> 1, "LastDay" -> 1, "LastWeek" -> 1, 
 "LastMonth" -> 1, "LastYear" -> 1, "All" -> 1|>

In[10]:= CloudLoggingData[CloudObject[obj1]]["TotalCreditsUsed"]

Out[10]= <|"LastHour" -> 1, "LastDay" -> 1, "LastWeek" -> 1, 
 "LastMonth" -> 1, "LastYear" -> 1, "All" -> 1|>

In[11]:= CloudLoggingData[CloudObject[obj2]]["TotalCalls"]

Out[11]= <|"LastHour" -> 13, "LastDay" -> 13, "LastWeek" -> 13, 
 "LastMonth" -> 13, "LastYear" -> 13, "All" -> 13|>

In[12]:= CloudLoggingData[CloudObject[obj2]]["TotalCreditsUsed"]

Out[12]= <|"LastHour" -> 15, "LastDay" -> 15, "LastWeek" -> 15, 
 "LastMonth" -> 15, "LastYear" -> 15, "All" -> 15|>

Deploying a object from the desktop does not use credits. Calling a object from the wolfram server involves the cloud kernel and uses up credits. One click on obj2 results in 13 calls. Now move the slider a few times from left to right. The kernel is involved .. its not only your browser doing the work…
hope this helps!

3

Thanks for the example, Pieter,

My issue is not so much with the desktop front end but the WPC front end, which looks like it does not know when a notebook has been unpublished. The “pseudo”-behavior is something like this:

  • Perform activity in WPC front end that does not consume credits
  • Publish that notebook, the published version of the notebook consumes credits
  • Activity in the WPC front end now consumes credits, even though it didn’t prior to publishing the page

It’s the third bullet point that I don’t quite understand.

4

Thanks for letting us know, we will look into this.