When Zuck launched Muse on September 8, most of the news focused on the agent. I got curious about the VM that it runs on. Every Muse agent gets its own Muse Secure VM, which is supposed to be a dedicated VM for each user, where your agent and data lives. This is available to every free user (not just paying users).
So I decided to ask what it is running on, and it turns out to be :
- 2 vCPUs, clock at 1497.749 MHz, sharing 1 physical core
- AMD EPYC 9D25 126-Core Processor
- KVM (hypervisor flag set in /proc/cpuinfo)
- 8GB of RAM
- 100GB volume for home, plus 7.5GB mounted at /
- About 644 MB/s read, 177 MB/s write
- Ubuntu 24.04, Linux kernel 7.0
This is actually… quite great, especially for free. This would be a $10-20/month VPS at a typical provider. DigitalOcean would charge you $40/month for a similar machine.
Does Meta throttle the machine?
No.
Meta gives you full power as long as you need it. Unlike Amazon burstable instances (T2/T3/etc), I benchmarked the VM for over an hour, and never found any throttling.
I ran 2 workers for an hour minutes, logging throughput every second alongside CPU steal from /proc/stat. The first 30 seconds averaged 3,411,111 iterations/s; the last 30 seconds averaged 3,280,000. You get full power all the time, with no burst and no throttle.
Then I ran sysbench with 2 threads, and got only 1.44x the single-threaded score. That was ambiguous; it could be just constantly throttling me (instead of a burst throttle), or it could be 2 threads running via SMT on the same core.
So I ran OpenSSL SHA512 and AES-256 benchmarks, and got 1.98x and 2x respectively. This shows the 2 vCPUs are the 2 SMT threads of a single physical EPYC core, running at about 1.5 GHz.
For free, it’s definitely nice #
It’s just like having your own VPS box, with no shutdowns and no throttling. I saw no evidence that the VM was oversubscribed on the host. I’m sure it is, because I heavily doubt Meta would only put 126 VMs on a single server, but I never hit any limits.