Can i provide jupyterhub-idle-culler-service values from options_form?

[eezonegg]

I would like to make it possible for users to set the --max-age seconds. I already provide a c.Spawner.options_form and my issue is I can’t see how it’s possible to get the user_options set in c.Spawner.options_form into c.JupyterHub.services for the idle-culler-service to consume.

Is there any way I can achieve this?

Many thanks

[manics]

The idle culler runs as a central privileged service (as opposed to one service per user pod), so it’s not possible to pass user options.

However Jupyter Server has the ability to shut itself down, see ServerApp.shutdown_no_activity_timeout in
https://jupyter-server.readthedocs.io/en/latest/other/full-config.html

This post is a good explanation of the difference between the two, though some of the information is out of date:

Which is the correct way to cull idle kernels and notebook?

While the two aim in general to solve the same category of problem (wasted resources), they have different metrics available and different levels of action to take. The notebook-environment configuration should in general produce better, more fine-grained results because it can do things like cull unused kernels and be aware of things like idle/busy or connected status. This lets the notebook server make more intelligent choices like “shutdown a kernel if it’s been idle for 5 minutes BUT not if…

[minrk]

The idle-culler doesn’t operate on this information, but it is available in the information retrieved, as server["user_options"]. So a slightly customized idle culler could choose to take this information into account. I think it would be hard to add generic support to the public idle culler package, though.