Colab Pro Plus - Page 2

chalsall · 2021-09-08, 14:19

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chuck

I had hoped that for $50/month I might get better hardware with Pro+ than with the previous Pro, but tonight it looks like time to leave.

Very sorry to hear that. But thanks very much for your contributions!

Just out of interest... Did you try experimenting with the "Factory Reset" option when you were given sub-optimal GPUs?

ATH · 2021-09-08, 16:20

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chuck

I had hoped that for $50/month I might get better hardware with Pro+ than with the previous Pro, but tonight it looks like time to leave. I had consistently been getting two 24-hour sessions each day with no worse than two P100 cards, and occasionally two V100s. Sometimes T4s were in the mix. Tonight when I started the next day's sessions I got K80s. That's unacceptable for this premium price, so I killed the two sessions and I have to say goodbye to Colab again. It was a good three week run.

I think you need to restart sessions completely after upgrading, and maybe it takes a little bit of time as well.

I was starting to get mostly T4's with occasional P100 on Pro nonplus(sed), and then I upgraded to Pro+ I immediately got 2x T4s again on Pro+. But the next day and since then, I have been getting V100's and a few P100, so I think I should have reset those 2x T4s sessions completely that first night and restarted, or maybe it just takes a day for it to update.

Even though it seems like a hard blow from $10 to $50 per month, I do think it is just a case of us being used to "too good to be true" until now. Last year when I started on normal Pro I was running 3 sessions P100 for 20-24 hours a day for $10 per months, so 1800-2160 hours of P100 for $10. Then later you could "only" get 2 sessions for 20+ hours or 3 sessions for much shorter but instead you could get V100s as well.

$50 isn't even enough to cover the power cost if I run 2 sessions P100/V100 for 20-24 hours per day, so 1200-1440 hours per months or 3.5-4.2 cents/hour.

Chuck · 2021-09-08, 19:57

Quote:

Originally Posted by chalsall

Very sorry to hear that. But thanks very much for your contributions!

Just out of interest... Did you try experimenting with the "Factory Reset" option when you were given sub-optimal GPUs?

Yes; I "factory reset" twice on each of the two sessions receiving K80s, and was given another K80 each time.

Chuck · 2021-09-08, 20:05

Quote:

Originally Posted by ATH

Even though it seems like a hard blow from $10 to $50 per month, I do think it is just a case of us being used to "too good to be true" until now. Last year when I started on normal Pro I was running 3 sessions P100 for 20-24 hours a day for $10 per months, so 1800-2160 hours of P100 for $10. Then later you could "only" get 2 sessions for 20+ hours or 3 sessions for much shorter but instead you could get V100s as well.

$50 isn't even enough to cover the power cost if I run 2 sessions P100/V100 for 20-24 hours per day, so 1200-1440 hours per months or 3.5-4.2 cents/hour.

I figured I was saving about $20/month electricity not running my own 1080ti GPU, and also not having the additional heat load in the room. Also the elimination of fan noise was worth something to me.

The graph from Challsall's site gives a good visual of the work I accomplished in three weeks of Pro+ (the blue to the right side).

joejoefla · 2021-10-31, 03:12

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chuck

Yes; I "factory reset" twice on each of the two sessions receiving K80s, and was given another K80 each time.

I'm having a hard time where after several days (Colab Pro+) I'm getting no GPU available.

LaurV · 2021-10-31, 05:41

I got bitten too, and contributed to Pro+ with a single account. First disappointment was that the price doesn't include taxes (which is actually written in small print somewhere) so I received a higher bill than written on site. This is common for Thailand and Singapore (where the Gluglu server is) but it was not like that in the past with none of my Pro (not plus) accounts. So it got me by surprise a little.

Then I got A100 three times in the beginning, which lasted respectively 16 hours, 24 hours, and 8 hours.

I was almost ready to praise the Pro+ account, but luckily I kept my mouth shut for some more time. Because after that, I could not get anything else than P100, for the next about 20 days. No A100, no V100, no lower card. Only P100. But I got this quite regular (i.e. each time I requested a GPU, it was a P100, never got the "no GPU" message) and it lasted everything between 3 hours and 30 hours (yes, few times it lasted longer than 24 hours).

If it broke during the night, without me realizing it in the evening, then there would be no new session until morning when I woke up (no "automated" connection, I did everything manually). Sometimes, if I realized before going to bed that the time will expire overnight, I would break the session, wait 10 minutes, and connect again, to be sure that the time doesn't expire during I was sleeping. But sometimes I forgot to do that.

During the day I would watch it and restart it in minutes (my usual day means like 14-16 hours in average, in front of the monitor) or mostly half hour after it expires.

Good point about Pro and Pro+ is the availability of the Terminal. You can do a lot of things with it, like delete temporary checkpoints and clutter, transfer files, maintenance, rights, and even "sudo apt-get install mc", hihi,

my favorite file manager, which works amazingly well (and unexpected) in Colab terminal.

Bad points is that you pay a lot of money for nothing. Or almost. If you compare with other offers available around, it is still a bit cheaper per GPU, but the others you can use for whatever you want (including mining) while Colab is quite restrictive. You may also need to consider that "the others" will give you 8 or 16 times more CPU cores per each GPU, while Colab only gives you one CPU core per GPU, so the price per resource is not so different as it seems.

Gluglu also don't state clear their terms, but that of course, is deliberate, they make some smoke with those rules so you shouldn't be sure what you get for the money you pay. Which sucks.

One "interesting" aspect (and somehow important) is the fact that the "factory reset" won't really work for Pro+. Once you got the GPU, you are stuck with it until it expires, or they will take it away if you don't use it for a while. They do a lot of advertising of the fact that in Pro+, as opposite of Free and Pro (not plus), the sessions run even after you disconnect the browser. In fact, this is the only "real" upgrade from Pro to Pro+. There is no other advantage. And for this, you pay 45 bucks (plus taxes) instead of 10 bucks (plus taxes) per month, per account. You don't really get a better GPU, and you don't really get longer running times, because all these are subject to "availability" (which you can't see, anyhow; they will give you what they want). But you really do get sessions which run "in background" even after you disconnect the browser, or your internet crashes for a while (happens here frequently, especially in the rainy season). But his is a double edge sword. Because now, yeah, it is good that you don't waste the computing time when your browser crashes, and don't waste the clicks to reconnect, but in the same time, you can not reset a session. When you click "factory reset" it looks like the session is gone, but then you reconnect and get the same GPU. You can try 100 times, the result would be the same. Then, accidentally, you open a Terminal (didn't I tell you this is very useful?) and type "uptime" and you see "7 hours" or "13 hours", or whatever time you had since you launched the current session before using factory reset. So, the factory reset sucks, they took a good step so you can not change the GPU with that.

Here is Singapore server. YMMV.

The account will expire on Nov 5th. It will not be renewed.
.

ATH · 2021-10-31, 07:52

For several weaks I got only T4s on Pro+, and I was not going to renew, but last 1-2 weeks it is better.
On one account I'm getting mostly V100 each time with 2-3 A100, on the other I get mostly P100 with a few V100. Not sure why it is so different between the 2 accounts.

LaurV · 2022-01-03, 05:47

google colab guys (intentional lower cases) show again how assholes they are, I still have 5 days of colab pro plus, but I checked the button with "I don't want to extend it for the next months", and in just 20 minutes they disconnected me, and I could not get a GPU in the last ~14 hours, the multisession wont work (it never worked too reliable anyhow, in this part of the world, I believe I am connected to S'pore servers), the "terminal" (yep! the terminal, that is why I paid for "pro", and that doesn't need ANY resources to work, unless you type crazy commands in it AFTER you open it) doesn't work, it says "not available", etc, and the (single-cpu-core) session I can still open behaves in ALL aspects as a free colab. I mean, FREE, not just pro (without plus). And I have the "plus" one (which gave me A100 in the first day for about 16 hours, and then P100 for the next ~20 days, with interruptions here and there, but it was generally working satisfactory for the money) for which I paid few times the price of a pro, PLUS the VAT tax (hidden cost, they added this from last autumn or so, I already complained about it here around, before that it was "what you see is what you pay", but now it is "what you pay when the bill comes, is more than what you see when checking out").

Yeah, well, I know I said it before, don't cut their money till the last minute, otherwise they will show you their asshole side. But I am getting old and forgetful, and I wanted to be sure that they won't renew it (which is done automatically, generally the same day or a day before expiration, so you want to be sure you don't end up paying one more month by accident).

It is not a "crisis" of GPUs, the other account(s) still get them regularly (still P100). I will keep a closer watch and unsubscribe with the other accounts just a day (or two) before termination.

LaurV · 2022-09-30, 10:45

Quote:

Originally Posted by LaurV

I got bitten too,

Quote:

Originally Posted by ATH

For several weaks [sic

] ...

A continuation of these adventures can be read in my blog posts, where it is shown that the situation improved a lot since last year. I was especially looking for these posts, to check the period when they were posted, to confirm the fact that the "scarcity" I was talking in the blog thread happens somehow in the same period of the year. It seems indeed that it may be related to school starting (students returning to schools, colleges, campuses, etc).

ATH · 2022-10-03, 10:07

Seems like the long period of "too good to be true" has ended now. They created a system of "compute units": 100 for Pro ($10/month) and 500 for Pro+ ($50/month).

https://www.theadreview.com/google-c...um-gpu-access/

It is strange I still do not have the Premium option in "Change runtime type", but I'm still getting V100 and A100. I cannot see my remaining compute units either, like this guy is showing here:

Notice it says Usage rate: 2.04 per hour. He does not specify which GPU he has, but that is "only" 245 hours on Pro+ so just over 10 days with 1 session per months.

LaurV · 2022-10-03, 16:32

I see that, but it sucks. It is not for one session, it is cumulative for all (i.e. all sessions show the same info, regardless of what they do, or resources they have, and starting something in a session changes the resource view in all). So, that guy may as well have had more than one GPU running. Anyhow, the amount of computing units you get for the money, sucks. I can't get a GPU right now to check.

Well, I go to bed (23:40 here), I will let it rest over night, as I posted in blog. We'll see tomorrow.

2021-10-31, 05:41	#17
LaurV Romulan Interpreter "name field" Jun 2011 Thailand 5·11²·17 Posts	I got bitten too, and contributed to Pro+ with a single account. First disappointment was that the price doesn't include taxes (which is actually written in small print somewhere) so I received a higher bill than written on site. This is common for Thailand and Singapore (where the Gluglu server is) but it was not like that in the past with none of my Pro (not plus) accounts. So it got me by surprise a little. Then I got A100 three times in the beginning, which lasted respectively 16 hours, 24 hours, and 8 hours. I was almost ready to praise the Pro+ account, but luckily I kept my mouth shut for some more time. Because after that, I could not get anything else than P100, for the next about 20 days. No A100, no V100, no lower card. Only P100. But I got this quite regular (i.e. each time I requested a GPU, it was a P100, never got the "no GPU" message) and it lasted everything between 3 hours and 30 hours (yes, few times it lasted longer than 24 hours). If it broke during the night, without me realizing it in the evening, then there would be no new session until morning when I woke up (no "automated" connection, I did everything manually). Sometimes, if I realized before going to bed that the time will expire overnight, I would break the session, wait 10 minutes, and connect again, to be sure that the time doesn't expire during I was sleeping. But sometimes I forgot to do that. During the day I would watch it and restart it in minutes (my usual day means like 14-16 hours in average, in front of the monitor) or mostly half hour after it expires. Good point about Pro and Pro+ is the availability of the Terminal. You can do a lot of things with it, like delete temporary checkpoints and clutter, transfer files, maintenance, rights, and even "sudo apt-get install mc", hihi, my favorite file manager, which works amazingly well (and unexpected) in Colab terminal. Bad points is that you pay a lot of money for nothing. Or almost. If you compare with other offers available around, it is still a bit cheaper per GPU, but the others you can use for whatever you want (including mining) while Colab is quite restrictive. You may also need to consider that "the others" will give you 8 or 16 times more CPU cores per each GPU, while Colab only gives you one CPU core per GPU, so the price per resource is not so different as it seems. Gluglu also don't state clear their terms, but that of course, is deliberate, they make some smoke with those rules so you shouldn't be sure what you get for the money you pay. Which sucks. One "interesting" aspect (and somehow important) is the fact that the "factory reset" won't really work for Pro+. Once you got the GPU, you are stuck with it until it expires, or they will take it away if you don't use it for a while. They do a lot of advertising of the fact that in Pro+, as opposite of Free and Pro (not plus), the sessions run even after you disconnect the browser. In fact, this is the only "real" upgrade from Pro to Pro+. There is no other advantage. And for this, you pay 45 bucks (plus taxes) instead of 10 bucks (plus taxes) per month, per account. You don't really get a better GPU, and you don't really get longer running times, because all these are subject to "availability" (which you can't see, anyhow; they will give you what they want). But you really do get sessions which run "in background" even after you disconnect the browser, or your internet crashes for a while (happens here frequently, especially in the rainy season). But his is a double edge sword. Because now, yeah, it is good that you don't waste the computing time when your browser crashes, and don't waste the clicks to reconnect, but in the same time, you can not reset a session. When you click "factory reset" it looks like the session is gone, but then you reconnect and get the same GPU. You can try 100 times, the result would be the same. Then, accidentally, you open a Terminal (didn't I tell you this is very useful?) and type "uptime" and you see "7 hours" or "13 hours", or whatever time you had since you launched the current session before using factory reset. So, the factory reset sucks, they took a good step so you can not change the GPU with that. Here is Singapore server. YMMV. The account will expire on Nov 5th. It will not be renewed. . Last fiddled with by LaurV on 2021-10-31 at 05:52

2022-01-03, 05:47	#19
LaurV Romulan Interpreter "name field" Jun 2011 Thailand 5×11²×17 Posts	Whoops... I did it again... (reopen colab pro plus in Dec 2021) google colab guys (intentional lower cases) show again how assholes they are, I still have 5 days of colab pro plus, but I checked the button with "I don't want to extend it for the next months", and in just 20 minutes they disconnected me, and I could not get a GPU in the last ~14 hours, the multisession wont work (it never worked too reliable anyhow, in this part of the world, I believe I am connected to S'pore servers), the "terminal" (yep! the terminal, that is why I paid for "pro", and that doesn't need ANY resources to work, unless you type crazy commands in it AFTER you open it) doesn't work, it says "not available", etc, and the (single-cpu-core) session I can still open behaves in ALL aspects as a free colab. I mean, FREE, not just pro (without plus). And I have the "plus" one (which gave me A100 in the first day for about 16 hours, and then P100 for the next ~20 days, with interruptions here and there, but it was generally working satisfactory for the money) for which I paid few times the price of a pro, PLUS the VAT tax (hidden cost, they added this from last autumn or so, I already complained about it here around, before that it was "what you see is what you pay", but now it is "what you pay when the bill comes, is more than what you see when checking out"). Yeah, well, I know I said it before, don't cut their money till the last minute, otherwise they will show you their asshole side. But I am getting old and forgetful, and I wanted to be sure that they won't renew it (which is done automatically, generally the same day or a day before expiration, so you want to be sure you don't end up paying one more month by accident). It is not a "crisis" of GPUs, the other account(s) still get them regularly (still P100). I will keep a closer watch and unsubscribe with the other accounts just a day (or two) before termination. Last fiddled with by LaurV on 2022-01-03 at 06:07

2022-10-03, 10:07	#21
ATH Einyen Dec 2003 Denmark 2³·431 Posts	Seems like the long period of "too good to be true" has ended now. They created a system of "compute units": 100 for Pro ($10/month) and 500 for Pro+ ($50/month). https://www.theadreview.com/google-c...um-gpu-access/ It is strange I still do not have the Premium option in "Change runtime type", but I'm still getting V100 and A100. I cannot see my remaining compute units either, like this guy is showing here: Notice it says Usage rate: 2.04 per hour. He does not specify which GPU he has, but that is "only" 245 hours on Pro+ so just over 10 days with 1 session per months. Last fiddled with by ATH on 2022-10-03 at 21:34

2022-10-03, 16:32	#22
LaurV Romulan Interpreter "name field" Jun 2011 Thailand 5×11²×17 Posts	I see that, but it sucks. It is not for one session, it is cumulative for all (i.e. all sessions show the same info, regardless of what they do, or resources they have, and starting something in a session changes the resource view in all). So, that guy may as well have had more than one GPU running. Anyhow, the amount of computing units you get for the money, sucks. I can't get a GPU right now to check. Well, I go to bed (23:40 here), I will let it rest over night, as I posted in blog. We'll see tomorrow. Last fiddled with by LaurV on 2022-10-03 at 16:39

Similar Threads
Thread	Thread Starter	Forum	Replies	Last Post
GPU72/Colab Error	Awesomeotts	GPU to 72	38	2022-08-13 19:40
Colab question	David703	GPU to 72	302	2022-07-01 03:41
I'm getting maybe 10 or 15 minutes with Colab before having to reset	mrk74	GPU to 72	21	2021-06-17 20:00
Revisiting msieve GPU with Colab	EdH	Msieve	4	2020-08-24 02:22
Alternatives to Google Colab	kriesel	Cloud Computing	11	2020-01-14 18:45

2021-10-31, 07:52	#18
ATH Einyen Dec 2003 Denmark 2³·431 Posts	For several weaks I got only T4s on Pro+, and I was not going to renew, but last 1-2 weeks it is better. On one account I'm getting mostly V100 each time with 2-3 A100, on the other I get mostly P100 with a few V100. Not sure why it is so different between the 2 accounts.