Hi, I'm the author of the article! Thank you for the awesome description of the various vm.dirty_* sysctls.
The problem described in my post was not _directly_ related to the kernel flushing dirty pages to disk. As such, I'm not sure that tweaking these sysctls would have made any difference.
Instead, we were seeing the kernel using too much CPU when it moved inodes from one cgroup to another. This is part of the kernel's writeback cgroup accounting logic. I believe this is a related but slightly different form of writeback problems :)
Yes, Con Ed now has smart meters that report electricity usage in realtime at 15 minute intervals. If you use Home Assistant, you can perhaps make use of the Opower integration to get this data: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/opower/
Although implementing the realtime API in the Opower integration has not yet been completed. That said, I don't think it would be too hard to implement. See: https://github.com/tronikos/opower/issues/24
This realtime data is also available and graphed on your account page on the Con Ed website and mobile app.
I wrote my own code that uses Con Ed's realtime API and writes the data to Prometheus so that I can view it in Grafana. My code was heavily influenced by Home Assistant's Opower integration code. Here's my code: https://github.com/dasl-/pitools/blob/main/sensors/measure_e...
I submitted this message, feel free to copy the same text and submit yourself also:
-----------------------------
I recently became aware that the Living Computers Museum, which was created by Paul Allen (Microsoft co-founder), is shutting down. As someone in the technology industry, I find that very sad! The museum was really magical. I'm wondering if the Gates Foundation can step up and save the museum from closing?