> apparently GCP cannot reliably “stop” a VM in a timely manner.
In OCI we made a decision years ago that after 15 minutes from sending an ACPI shutdown signal, the instance should be hard powered off. We do the same for VM or BM. If you really want to, we take an optional parameter on the shutdown and reboot commands to bypass this and do an immediate hard power off.
So worst case scenario here, 15 minutes to get it shut down and be able to detach the boot volume to attach to another instance.
I had this happen to one of my VMs, I was trying to compile something and went out of memory, then tried to stop the VM and it only came back after 15 min. I think it is a good compromise, long enough to give a chance for a clean reboot but short enough to prevent longer downtimes.
I’m just a free tier user but OCI is quite powerful. It feels a bit like KDE to me where sometimes it takes a while to find out where some option is, but I can always find it somewhere, and in the end it beats feeling limited by lack of options.
We've tried at shorter time periods, back in the earlier days of our platform. Unfortunately what we've found is that the few times we've tried to lower it from 15 minutes, we've ended up with Windows users experiencing corrupt drives. Our best blind interpretation is that some things common enough on Windows can take up to 14 minutes to shut down under worst circumstances. So 15 minutes it is!
In OCI we made a decision years ago that after 15 minutes from sending an ACPI shutdown signal, the instance should be hard powered off. We do the same for VM or BM. If you really want to, we take an optional parameter on the shutdown and reboot commands to bypass this and do an immediate hard power off.
So worst case scenario here, 15 minutes to get it shut down and be able to detach the boot volume to attach to another instance.