Cycles vs Instructions

Developers Motoko
1

I heard two variants of reality:

  1. As of July 2022, ten instructions are equivalent to four cycles on an application subnet.
  2. Instructions are currently the same as cycles.

Which is true?

2

Also, do instructions account to such things as creating a new canister (and for transferring remaining cycles to the newly created canister)?

3

The following example prints:

Spent cycles: 29_009

It follows that only actual instructions are counted. Neither cycles spent for canister creation nor cycles copied to the canister are counted.

import Nat64 "mo:base/Nat64";
import IC "mo:base/ExperimentalInternetComputer";
// import Cycles "mo:base/ExperimentalCycles";
import Debug "mo:base/Debug";
import {ic} "mo:ic";
actor {
  public shared func greet<system>() : async () {
    let instructionsCounter = IC.performanceCounter(1);
    ignore await (with cycles = 4_000_000_000_000) ic.create_canister({
      settings = ?{
        freezing_threshold = null;
        controllers = null;
        reserved_cycles_limit = null;
        log_visibility = null;
        wasm_memory_limit = null;
        memory_allocation = null;
        compute_allocation = null;
      };
      sender_canister_version = null;
    });
    let spentCycles = Nat64.toNat(IC.performanceCounter(1) - instructionsCounter);
    Debug.print("Spent cycles: " # debug_show(spentCycles));
  };
};
4

It is the former. For more details on pricing please see here: Cycles cost formulas | Internet Computer