{"slug": "meta-muse-gives-you-a-pretty-nice-vm-for-free", "title": "Meta Muse gives you a pretty nice VM for free", "summary": "A developer benchmarked the free Muse Secure VM that Meta provides to every Muse personal AI agent user and found it runs on an AMD EPYC 9D25 with 2 vCPUs (two SMT threads of a single physical core at ~1.5 GHz), 8GB RAM, and a 100GB home volume, with roughly 644 MB/s reads and 177 MB/s writes. Sustained testing over an hour showed no throttling, and OpenSSL SHA512 and AES-256 benchmarks scaled 1.98x and 2x across the two threads, indicating the vCPUs are SMT siblings rather than separate cores.", "body_md": "When Zuck launched [Muse](https://about.fb.com/news/2026/09/introducing-muse-personal-ai-agent/) 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).  \n\nSo I decided to ask what it is running on, and it turns out to be :\n\n- 2 vCPUs, clock at 1497.749 MHz, sharing 1 physical core\n- AMD EPYC 9D25 126-Core Processor\n- KVM (hypervisor flag set in /proc/cpuinfo)\n- 8GB of RAM\n- 100GB volume for home, plus 7.5GB mounted at /\n- About 644 MB/s read, 177 MB/s write\n- Ubuntu 24.04, Linux kernel 7.0\n\nThis 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.\n\n### Does Meta throttle the machine?\n\nNo.\n\nMeta 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.\n\nI 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.\n\nThen 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.\n\nSo 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.\n\n## For free, it’s definitely nice\n\nIt’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.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/meta-muse-gives-you-a-pretty-nice-vm-for-free", "canonical_source": "https://unexcitedneurons.substack.com/p/meta-muse-gives-you-a-pretty-nice", "published_at": "2026-09-30 04:39:26+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-19 23:14:20.997320+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "ai-infrastructure", "ai-products"], "entities": ["Meta", "Muse", "Muse Secure VM", "AMD", "EPYC 9D25", "Ubuntu", "DigitalOcean", "Mark Zuckerberg"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/meta-muse-gives-you-a-pretty-nice-vm-for-free", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/meta-muse-gives-you-a-pretty-nice-vm-for-free.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/meta-muse-gives-you-a-pretty-nice-vm-for-free.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/meta-muse-gives-you-a-pretty-nice-vm-for-free.jsonld"}}