What Fresh Hell is This?

Finances Friday pays off again

2026-01-30, by DrFriendless costs

I just remembered it was Friday - these short weeks are difficult - and so it was Finances Friday, it wasn’t “Happily Adding New Features Day” as I had hoped. I killed off the old blog server a couple of days ago so I was hoping for a nice number.

The good news is that costs are very low, although there was no sign of a decrease due to killing the blog server. However there was this mysterious green lump in the graph. It was only a lump of about $2 per day, but as I didn’t ask for it I needed to investigate.

Big green lumps belong on Shrek, not in my costs

It was attributed to “EC2 Other”, which is not a thing I remember buying. A bit of investigation suggested that it was due to excess CPU usage. Standard CPU usage for the EC2 (I only have one) is about 1%, so it was unusual that it was at about 50% for a few days. I don’t really get why I would be charged extra for using my CPU 50% of the time when I’m already paying for it, but I’m sure such things make sense in the AWS world.

The high green line caused the blue line to fall down, so the purple line kicked in which cost me money

Anyway, it seems to have been caused by the bug I posted about on Tuesday, as the timeline and symptoms match. Oh well, I must stop putting bugs in. At least my processes caught it fairly quickly.