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?
I made a post about this a while back because I had some of the same concerns about power usage. (https://lemmy.world/post/41185625)
As most people are telling you, as they told me, ‘get better, more efficient equipment’, which is great advice if you are buying, but not so helpful if you’ve already bought. First thing I’d do is get a watt meter to get a baseline of what is being consumed. You can get watt meters from Amazon, or your preferred big box vendor, for cheap.
Once you have the baseline, then you can go about fiddling with Linux and your server, to find areas of excess power consumption. Please note tho, you’re not going to tame a $100 a month server down to $20. That’s just outside the realm of reality. However, every little bit helps. Go into your BIOS and check if there are power saving options there as well.
I know this will go against the grain, but I have a cron that powers off the server every evening before I retire. I am the only user of my services and I have no midnight, mass Linux ISO downloads going on, so I couldn’t justify having the server run for 10+ hours idle, consuming electricity. Electricity here is fairly cheap and I also have solar panels, but still, I think it’s worth the effort to be prudent with your resources.
In the end, the final tally was that I spend around $35 USD per month in electricity, which is far less than most people spend on a hobby.