For calculating my monthly cost with OpenVidu running on AWS, should I be looking at the number of vCPUs or the actual number of physical cores?

Hi there, I am in the process of switching from OpenVidu Enterprise 2.20.0 to 2.22.0. The instances I set up on AWS were based on the numbers I found on the OpenVidu pricing page.

However, I’ve noticed that my invoice is roughly double what I was expecting it to be so far.

I have 6 (physical) cores split between my master/media node instances which comes out to 12 vCPUs. The invoice inside my OpenVidu account seems to correspond to the 12 vCPUs number rather than the physical cores (unless I’m doing my math wrong). So my question is:

On AWS, should I actually be looking at the number of vCPUs available to my instance and not the number of physical cores in terms of calculating my monthly OpenVidu costs?

Thanks!

You should always use vCPUs. Nowdays it wouldn’t make much sense for processes to count physical cores.
For AWS c4 EC2 instances, this is the column with the relevant information:

For on premises hardware, I can examplify this with one of our Linux servers, which has 4 physical cores and 8 total CPUs. All standard commands to list CPU information provide the same answer:

  • lscpu: (1 physical socket with 4 physical cores with 2 threads per core, that’s a total of 8 CPUs)
Architecture:                    x86_64
CPU op-mode(s):                  32-bit, 64-bit
Byte Order:                      Little Endian
Address sizes:                   39 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
CPU(s):                          8
On-line CPU(s) list:             0-7
Thread(s) per core:              2
Core(s) per socket:              4
Socket(s):                       1
NUMA node(s):                    1
  • nproc:
8
  • htop

So yes, when OpenVidu gathers CPU information, it will always count available vCPUs, no matter how many chips there are or what the hardware configuration is like.