Sixteen vCPUs cap one GPU pod at four concurrent 3D avatars

The pass criterion is worth copying. A rendering failure in this pipeline skips time rather than stuttering: the team reports a 90-second animation that came out as a 6-second file while the FPS logs looked fine ^[4]. So the test asserts duration on the artefact rather than throughput in the logs ^[3]. The window is also well chosen for a second reason. Eighty-nine seconds is longer than the 60-second cadence on which the bad hosts died ^[11], which means a host-level defect surfaces inside one capacity run instead of in a live segment ^[19].

Packing four avatars onto one box came down to a filename. The renderer sent page audio to ffmpeg through /tmp/audio.fifo, the second avatar on the host grabbed the same pipe, and the audio interfered; the fix was to make the path unique per port, /tmp/audio-<port>.fifo ^[7]. The author's list of the same class of hazard is short and correct: temporary files, fixed ports, lock files, cache directories ^[8]. Multi-tenancy here was a naming convention.

At four avatars the card reported 26 percent utilisation, and the team names the 16 vCPUs as the resource that ran out ^[5], because the GPU only does rendering while the rest of the streaming pipeline sits on the CPU ^[6]. Scale that GPU figure linearly and the card alone would carry about fifteen avatars ^[23]. You are actually buying the pod, not the accelerator.

For ¥7,600 to transfer to your rig, a specific set of conditions has to hold: a pod at $0.28 an hour with 720 hours billed ^[9], 16 vCPU sitting behind that card ^[5], capture at 33fps ^[3], and bandwidth included in the pod price ^[14]. Change the vCPU-to-GPU ratio and the divisor moves. The author's own scheduling figure survives a re-check: eight hours a day is 240 hours, which at $0.28 is $67.20, or ¥2,520 per avatar across four at ¥150 to the dollar, matching the ¥2,500 quoted ^[20].

Bandwidth is the line most likely to break the comparison. At 2.5Mbps a stream moves roughly 27GB a day, and a cloud charging about $0.09/GB adds around ¥360 a day or ¥10,000 a month, where GPU-specialised clouds often bundle it ^[14]. If that 2.5Mbps describes one avatar, egress on a metered cloud costs about 1.3 times the ¥7,600 of compute underneath it ^[18]. The source does not say whether the bitrate is per avatar or per host, and that is worth resolving before anyone quotes either figure.

All of this is one team's self-reported measurement of its own workload, published in Japanese and reposted to dev.to ^[16]. The method is the transferable part. Renting a GPU for a few hours costs a few hundred yen ^[15], which buys a number where an estimate would have been free and wrong.