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?
Newer hardware that has lower idle consumption mostly. I’ve found there’s not much to do on a typical setup as far as software optimization, as most OS’s are already set up for pretty low power usage while idle.
HDD sleep can work if you don’t have anything accessing the drives, but with all the stuff running on my server there’s basically always some kind of activity going on so they never sleep. Less HDDs is the answer for me, I just have 2 large drives in a ZFS mirror.
My HP box with an i5-7500 idles around 15-20W which is decently low, but I also have 2 PCs with i3-7100u mobile chips that idle at 1-2W with 32GB of RAM and an NVMe SSD, which is wild.
Avoiding enterprise gear is key, it’s extremely power hungry.