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?
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
The mini PCs draw up to 30W, mine runs at an 8W average
I have never measured my pi consumption but ilo says my DL380 Gen8 idles at between 120w to 180w
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.
Ooof, your power bill.
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.
There was that site a couple months back doing the rounds about calculating the roi on self hosting vs paying for streaming
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.
My Pi5 tops out at 15W.
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).
This Jeff Geerling video from a couple of weeks back was an eye-opener.
Just because you might be able to find a cheap G5 Xserve server that runs at 200W when idle, doesn’t mean you should.
Mini PCs are even less usually, mine are around 2W idle which is less than my Pi! (i3-7100u CPUs)