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?

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
    7·
    11 hours ago

    I got a power-efficient mainboard and PSU. I think that’ll be the lion’s share. And I don’t have any unnecessary stuff like a GPU or extra stuff connected.

    I ran powertop and adopted the recommendations to set the various buses, peripherals and devices into powersave mode. That does a few Watts here and there. CPU of course is also allowed to save power when idle.

    And then I made the harddisks spin down after 40min of not being used. Or something like that. So they’ll automatically spin down at night and when I’m not using them. As spinning hdds consume quite a lot of power if you have multiple of them and compare it to the 15-20W or so the rest of the computer uses. The operating system is on a SSD.

    • Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.clubEnglish
      3·
      4 hours ago

      Yes, ppl usually don’t really look at PSU efficiency curves.

      Random example:

      If you are gonna run on 20W most of the time you can calculate how much of a difference a certain PSU can make you (if you find a proper test that is).

      That said, I do not recommend to use shitty PSUs, safety first, the components & layout need to be good (most of consumer PSUs are fairly garbage).
      A bit like you wouldn’t use regular consumer HDDs.
      (For most ez homelab cases every other component can be cheap consumer grade tho, exemptions ofc exist.)

      • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
        2·
        57 minutes ago

        Yeah, I think the correct sticker on a PSU would be something like 80 Plus Ruby?! Everything else comes with 80+% efficiency at 20% rated load. Which is 200W for a 1000W PSU. And there’s no guarantee on what happens below that, so it might very well be utter garbage at a home server power draw of 20-30W.

        You never know without looking up the datasheets. Though, back when I built my home server/NAS, I failed to find a good one. I got a PicoPSU and a 12V power brick instead. Not sure if that’s still a thing. But I remember it was a lot of work to find proper and efficient components. And it doesn’t make any sense to put in all the effort (and money) and then burn all the saved energy, and then some more, in an average PSU.

        Some MiniPCs, NUCs and even computers also come with fairly efficient power supplies.