@admin @ternaard
@stefano

Excellent work Fedimeteo

You are systematically covering many areas of the planet, with weather information, right here at the fingertips of the FediVerse userbase

Many remain silent, and I'm not speaking for them, however I am certain that everyone is thankful for your hard and systematic work

And most of all you're doing it on a VPN running freeBSD which cost you 4 Euros a month which is an impressive feat

#FediMeteo #FediVerse #freeBSD #weather #technology #OpenSource #programming
#Nederland

Here is the CPU usage graph for the last 24 hours of the FediMeteo VM. A full 24 hours, during which a huge number of people are connecting, helped by the traction gained from being among the top stories on Hacker News and Lobsters, as well as the many shares across the Fediverse.

RAM usage? Active, around 450 MB. Then there is cache, ARC, and so on. But in practice, zero swap in use after days of uptime.

39 jails running, 39 snac instances, nginx serving the homepage, and HAProxy. HAProxy caching enabled. ZFS snapshots every 15 minutes, backups via zfs send and receive every hour. The same hourly schedule applies to the recalculation of cities, countries, and followers for the homepage.

All of this on a 4 euro per month FreeBSD VM.

If anyone has doubts about the quality and efficiency of FreeBSD, this is the data to show.

#FediMeteo #FreeBSD #RunBSD #IT #SysAdmin

Alt...

Time series graph showing CPU usage percentage over roughly 24 hours. The x axis represents time from about 13:00 to 12:00 the next day, and the y axis shows CPU usage from 0 to 100 percent. CPU usage fluctuates mostly between 15 and 35 percent, with periodic rises during daytime and early morning hours. Several short spikes reach around 45 to 55 percent, and one brief peak climbs to about 60 percent. Usage drops to lower levels, around 10 to 20 percent, during late evening and early morning periods. Overall, the graph shows moderate, variable CPU load with occasional sharp peaks.

Exactly one year ago, on 30th December 2024, I laid the foundation of FediMeteo.

I took a VM, installed FreeBSD, and set up the first jail to support Italy. The goal was to create a tool for my own use, support a few countries, and announce it.

Unexpectedly, the enthusiasm was incredible. That pushed me to keep going, support more countries and cities, and turn it into what it is today.

FediMeteo now supports 38 countries and 2,937 cities, with more than 7,700 followers in the Fediverse alone, not counting the many people who follow via RSS feeds or visit the web pages.

If you are curious to read the story and some technical details, you can find it here:
https://it-notes.dragas.net/2025/02/26/fedimeteo-how-a-tiny-freebsd-vps-became-a-global-weather-service-for-thousands/

Today is also Tuesday, a #ThankYouTuesday, so I want to say thanks to:

* OpenMeteo - @openmeteo - for providing accurate, high quality data, without which FediMeteo would be far less useful

* @grunfink - creator of snac, who made all of this possible using very few resources, on a 4 euro per month VM

* FreeBSD, which thanks to the efficiency of the OS and its jail implementation made it possible to run this service in a stable and efficient way with minimal effort

* FediFollows - @FediFollows - that periodically spreads the word about cities, countries, and the enthusiasm around the project

*All of you*, who suggested, encouraged, corrected, and celebrated this project

And forward toward supporting more countries and other interesting features already in the works.

Happy birthday, FediMeteo! 🎉

#FediMeteo #HappyBirthday #Meteo #Weather #FreeBSD #snac #snac2 #OpenMeteo #Fediverse

I took a VM, installed FreeBSD, and set up the first jail to support Italy. The goal was to create a tool for my own use, support a few countries, and announce it.

Unexpectedly, the enthusiasm was incredible. That pushed me to keep going, support more countries and cities, and turn it into what it is today.

FediMeteo now supports 38 countries and 2,937 cities, with more than 7,700 followers in the Fediverse alone, not counting the many people who follow via RSS feeds or visit the web pages.

If you are curious to read the story and some technical details, you can find it here:
https://it-notes.dragas.net/2025/02/26/fedimeteo-how-a-tiny-freebsd-vps-became-a-global-weather-service-for-thousands/

Today is also Tuesday, a #ThankYouTuesday, so I want to say thanks to:

• OpenMeteo - @openmeteo@fosstodon.org - for providing accurate, high quality data, without which FediMeteo would be far less useful

• @grunfink@comam.es - creator of snac, who made all of this possible using very few resources, on a 4 euro per month VM

• FreeBSD, which thanks to the efficiency of the OS and its jail implementation made it possible to run this service in a stable and efficient way with minimal effort

• FediFollows - @FediFollows@social.growyourown.services - that periodically spreads the word about cities, countries, and the enthusiasm around the project

And forward toward supporting more countries and other interesting features already in the works.

Happy birthday, FediMeteo! 🎉

#FediMeteo #HappyBirthday #Meteo #Weather #FreeBSD #snac #snac2 #OpenMeteo #Fediverse

In the past few days FediMeteo seemed to be having some performance trouble. I dug into it and only found minor issues, until I realised the VM itself had fallen off a cliff. After several reboots it became clear that both bandwidth and I/O latency had dropped to absurd levels. I suspect the provider slapped a cap on it.

So I took the chance to move everything to another VM and provider, still at 4 euro per month. And starting today, forecasts will be delivered straight from Italy. The performance jump feels like going from a storm to clear skies.

FediMeteo’s mission goes on. More countries are coming (stay tuned!) and we will keep aiming to serve everything from a 4 euro VM. I do have powerful hardware available, but proving that the project can run on tiny resources is still part of the mission.

#FediMeteo #FediMeteoAnnouncements #FediMeteoServices #VM #RunBSD #FreeBSD

I’ve finally retired the old cron + sh setup for the weather bots. It served us well, but it had a major flaw: if I rebooted the server while it was posting, the job just died halfway. If the server was down during a scheduled slot, the forecast was lost forever.

So, I wrote a custom Python daemon to run inside the FreeBSD Jails.

• It’s stateful now. If a crash happens at city 15 of 50, it resumes exactly there on reboot.

• If the server naps/is rebooting during a scheduled run, the bot realizes it missed a slot and runs immediately upon waking up.

As the great @FediFollows@social.growyourown.services posted about this service, many of you started following me and the cities. And I'm so glad about it!

If you want to know something more about FediMeteo and its story (and how all this is still working on a 4 euro/month VPS powered by #FreeBSD), you can have a look here:

FediMeteo: How a Tiny €4 FreeBSD VPS Became a Global Weather Service for Thousands - https://it-notes.dragas.net/2025/02/26/fedimeteo-how-a-tiny-freebsd-vps-became-a-global-weather-service-for-thousands/

Hello Fedi friends!

My child and I arrived in Italy yesterday to spend all of July at my parents' 🇮🇹

What's the first thing I did this morning? Following @milano to have weather forecasts here in my feed.

Special thanks to @stefano for creating this incredible project.

For those of you not familiar with #FediMeteo, it covers 2893 cities in 38 countries. All powered by a 4€/month VPS with #snac and #freeBSD:

https://it-notes.dragas.net/2025/02/26/fedimeteo-how-a-tiny-freebsd-vps-became-a-global-weather-service-for-thousands/

Grazie Stefano! 🙏✨🏆

#FediMeteo #FreeBSD

https://it-notes.dragas.net/2025/02/26/fedimeteo-how-a-tiny-freebsd-vps-became-a-global-weather-service-for-thousands/

#FediMeteo #Fediverse #FreeBSD #RunBSD #Hosting #ITNotes #Networking #NoteHUB #Server #Snac #Snac2 #Social #Web

Some technical details for those interested:
The entire FediMeteo setup runs on a FreeBSD VM costing around 4 euros per month. It supports almost all major EU countries (plus the UK), with just a few left to complete. Currently, there are 25 separate jails, each running its own instance of snac, totaling 25 instances. The VM load typically stays around 10%, which increases to 30% when updates are published for countries with larger numbers of cities (currently Germany and Italy). The only time the load spikes is when new countries are announced; during that time, all remote instances connect to all cities to download their details.
As for RAM usage, excluding the ZFS cache, it's currently a total of 213 MB. Yes, MB.

#FreeBSD #FediMeteo #snac #Fediverse #Efficiency #RunBSD