I’m wondering what folks do to optimise the power efficiency of their Linux servers. I’ve never really got to the bottom of what is the best way to do this and with the current energy crisis its a pertinent topic.

I’m talking about home servers, so the availability requirements are not the same as in a corporate environment. There might be vast chunks of time during the day or night when they sit idle, and home users are more tolerant of a lag when accessing resources if it means lower energy bills.

Specifically I’ve been thinking about:

  • allowing lower power states when idle
  • spinning-down hdd’s when they’re not in use
  • MAYBE letting machines sleep/hibernate
  • setting schedules of times where you know demand will be low/zero and efficiency can be managed aggressively
  • any other quick wins I’ve missed

It would be amazing if there was one tool or one guide that helps with all of that but thats never the case, is it 😅

Thoughts?

  • slazer2au@lemmy.worldEnglish
    48·
    8 hours ago

    Letting go of older inefficient hardware is no 1.

    Why run a 200w server when a 30w mini PC or 10w pi can run a dozen containers

      • slazer2au@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        6 hours ago

        I have never measured my pi consumption but ilo says my DL380 Gen8 idles at between 120w to 180w

        • brygphilomena@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          2·
          2 hours ago

          The ipmi on my supermicro says it’s running 497w.

          But that’s what 38 HDDs will do to ya. I used to spin them down when not in use (it’s mostly a Plex server) but it’s in my garage and over the winter I had some issues with the older HDDs not wanting to spin up in freezing temps. I’ll probably move it back to spinning them down over the summer.

            • brygphilomena@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              2·
              1 hour ago

              Cheaper than netflix, paramount plus, hulu, sling, fubo, Disney+, etc

              Maybe not when talking about the hdd cost, though. It’s over 300tb of usable space. But at least a good amount of what I use has been wasted I’ve gotten for free.

              • slazer2au@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                1 hour ago

                There was that site a couple months back doing the rounds about calculating the roi on self hosting vs paying for streaming

        • ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          2·
          2 hours ago

          My old Pi4 with SSD averaged around 7W, so only 1W lower than my mini PC, but performance and usability of my mini PC is far greater (and it comes with 1tb NVME and 16GB ram). I generally advice against using most SBCs these days unless you specifically need the pin I/O for something.

    • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
      15·
      7 hours ago

      Sadly this. I have a graveyard of nice server boards that I got cheap before realizing how power hungry they are.

      For CPUs basically anything older than gen 6 intel is too power hungry (although be careful with Xeon and xeon derived cpus, that are sometimes older gens rebadged as gen 6).