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
My Pi5 tops out at 15W.
Mini PCs are even less usually, mine are around 2W idle which is less than my Pi! (i3-7100u CPUs)
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.