Autotester farm is down

[Seb via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 17 August 2016 at 23:47:33 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 8/17/2016 4:13 PM, Brad Roberts via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> Several of the machines are run out of aws.  The cost of 
>> running a windows
>> instance inside aws is pretty awful.  Shrug.. it's a wash, for 
>> the most part.
>
> For the ones in house, I wonder if it would be cost effective 
> to replace them with ones that draw less power. For example, 
> Win7 laptops can be picked up at the pawn shop for about $150. 
> Put an SSD drive in them, max out the ram, turn off the 
> display, and run them. Of course, they'll be slow, but that may 
> not matter if 2 or 3 running in parallel can replace a single 
> power hungry machine.

Some points that I can throw into the discussion:

1) There are several small companies (e.g. http://winity.io/) 
that offer moderately cheap Windows VPS machines, but I don't 
know how much power you get in the end
2) I don't think that the connection is an issue as long as one 
has a decent down link (even this could be avoided if we cache 
the git clone locally)
3) I really like the idea of stocking up some laptops :)
4) I heard that in Moldavia one only pays about 7€/month for a 
100M/down connection ;-)
5) At my universities every group has its owns clusters, because 
bureaucracy is so complicated that you can't get access to the 
big ones, and as you would expect, they usually idle around the 
entire day ...
6) AppVeyor (http://appveyor.com) provides one concurrent job 
(with 2 cores) for free for open-source projects and if I read 
their pricing correctly they charge 25$ for each additional 
concurrent job as OSS get a heavy discount. Since they switched 
to their new Hypervisor [1], the builds are even twice as fast 
than Travis (for mir) :)

[1] 
https://www.appveyor.com/blog/2016/07/16/migration-to-rackspace/