# Understanding Canisters Live on the IC
**URL:** https://forum.dfinity.org/t/understanding-canisters-live-on-the-ic/39629
**Category:** Developers
**Created:** [January 3, 2025, 4:54am UTC](https://forum.dfinity.org/t/understanding-canisters-live-on-the-ic/39629 "2025-01-03T04:54:38Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@josephgranata](https://forum.dfinity.org/u/josephgranata)
#### Post date: [January 3, 2025, 4:54am UTC](https://forum.dfinity.org/t/understanding-canisters-live-on-the-ic/39629/1 "2025-01-03T04:54:38Z")
Dear IC Friends,
As we get ready to launch Satoshi Notes we already published online our two main canisters.
We want to make sure it is fully ready for launch, meaning it has enough cycles, and everything is okay. Because of this I started to examine carefully the data that this command gives us about every Canister that is live on the IC:
> dfx canister status --all --network=ic
I do understand the basics, such as the Cycles Balance, and controllers.
But to be perfectly honest, the rest is not that clear. So I leave a list here and hope that some smarter people than me at DFINITY or in our community can tell me what these mean. Here is the list for one of our canisters, you can see the actual output of the command attached to this as well. **Please help if you know what these things mean.**
1. Freezing threshold. What is this, the low cycle balance that would freeze the canister?
2. Memory Size. What is it?
3. Reserved Cycles Limit. 5\_000\_000\_000\_000 Cycles. What does it mean, what does this do? We do notice this default is in both of our canisters.
4. Wasm memory limit: 3\_221\_225\_472 Bytes. I am guessing this is a higher limit than before correct? How much are we using?
5. Module hash. Why does this matter? How do we use it?
6. Instructions spent in queries: 1\_088\_708\_673. I am guessing these are the cycles we have spent so far. Is this correct?
7. Total query response payload size, and Total query request payload size.
What do these mean exactly? Our numbers show: 356\_421 bytes for the request payload size, and 9\_279\_491 bytes for the response payload size.
Thanks again for any light you can shed on these statistics from the IC regarding our canisters. I am sure this knowledge will be useful for you too once you publish on the IC yourself.
And of course, Happy New Year Everyone!
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### Author:  [@jennifertran](https://forum.dfinity.org/u/jennifertran)
#### Post date: [January 3, 2025, 6:23am UTC](https://forum.dfinity.org/t/understanding-canisters-live-on-the-ic/39629/2 "2025-01-03T06:23:31Z")
The [Settings doc](https://internetcomputer.org/docs/current/developer-docs/smart-contracts/maintain/settings) should answer most of your questions. However, I will double check again if the doc is missing anything tomorrow!
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### Author:  [@josephgranata](https://forum.dfinity.org/u/josephgranata)
#### Post date: [January 3, 2025, 6:37pm UTC](https://forum.dfinity.org/t/understanding-canisters-live-on-the-ic/39629/3 "2025-01-03T18:37:50Z")
Thanks Jennifer, I will go over the whole document, and if there remain some questions, I will follow up over here. Happy New Year Jennifer!