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Saving Energy: Home Server That Automatically Suspends to RAM and Wakes Up Again

maximiliangolla.com

41–50 of 230 posts

Re: Saving Energy: Home Server That Automatically Suspends to RAM and Wakes Up Again

#42
I built something similar to this to turn on / off a windows gaming PC when I first made my switch to 100% full Linux on my main computer: https://github.com/gravypod/SteamStreamScripts

There's a huge amount of savings in energy to be had from automatically sleeping + WOLing PCs.

Re: Saving Energy: Home Server That Automatically Suspends to RAM and Wakes Up Again

#43
post #23

€0.49 / kWh is an insanely high price for electricity. Here in the US in Cali, $0.32 / kWh is considered a steep price. I've heard the price in Oregon is $̶0̶.̶0̶2̶ ̶/̶ ̶k̶W̶h̶ $0.20 / kWh. What gives.. why can't electricity be delivered less expensively / more economically in Germany? Edit: Thanks for the corrections regarding Oregon, makes me feel a little better about the situations elsewhere. :)

I live in Northern California, in the PG&E service area. I pay something like $0.35/kWh in the evenings, and more during the day.

(It's a bit confusing to calculate the rate, as for some reason the bill has separate sections for 'generation' and 'delivery'.)

Re: Saving Energy: Home Server That Automatically Suspends to RAM and Wakes Up Again

#44
43 watts idle seems quite excessive. A M1 Mac Mini idles at 7 watts. One of the older Intel models (not the last one) would do 6 watts.

The author achieved some impressive savings, but I wonder how much lower it could go with a more efficient machine.

(Obviously that costs money and the article’s technique is free)

Re: Saving Energy: Home Server That Automatically Suspends to RAM and Wakes Up Again

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reverse proxy on the Pi? If a request comes in for the server and x minutes have elapsed since last activity/WoL, send a new WoL. I'm a little out of my wheelhouse though. Maybe that would only work for HTTP which will not cover Time Machine? Does Time Machine run on a schedule? Add a cron job (whatever the Mac equivalent is) to send a WoL ~1min beforehand?

>Does Time Machine run on a schedule? Add a cron job (whatever the Mac equivalent is) to send a WoL ~1min beforehand? I believe on x86 the BIOS supports setting a timer for self-wakeup. The OS can tell the BIOS "I'm going to sleep. Pull me out of sleep if the RTC passes this datetime."

Of all the x86 type BIOS and EFI, I've never seen one that didn't support that. Even thinclients and things you'd expect to leave that feature out.

Re: Saving Energy: Home Server That Automatically Suspends to RAM and Wakes Up Again

#46
post #23

€0.49 / kWh is an insanely high price for electricity. Here in the US in Cali, $0.32 / kWh is considered a steep price. I've heard the price in Oregon is $̶0̶.̶0̶2̶ ̶/̶ ̶k̶W̶h̶ $0.20 / kWh. What gives.. why can't electricity be delivered less expensively / more economically in Germany? Edit: Thanks for the corrections regarding Oregon, makes me feel a little better about the situations elsewhere. :)

I live in Northern California, in the PG&E service area. I pay something like $0.35/kWh in the evenings, and more during the day. (It's a bit confusing to calculate the rate, as for some reason the bill has separate sections for 'generation' and 'delivery'.)

We know why we can't have cheap and efficiently delivered power in California: PG&E has no incentive to deliver such a product.

My solution is to run my servers and live life as I please (within some degree of reason), and not look at the power bill too often. In my experience, the monthly charges don't correspond with my actions attempting to reduce or increase consumption in specific categories (e.g. hottubs, servers).

With that said, I do flip off the lights when not in use :p

Re: Saving Energy: Home Server That Automatically Suspends to RAM and Wakes Up Again

#47
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Northern California, in the PG&E service area. I pay something like $0.35/kWh in the evenings, and more during the day. (It's a bit confusing to calculate the rate, as for some reason the bill has separate sections for 'generation' and 'delivery'.)

We know why we can't have cheap and efficiently delivered power in California: PG&E has no incentive to deliver such a product. My solution is to run my servers and live life as I please (within some degree of reason), and not look at the power bill too often. In my experience, the monthly charges don't correspond with my actions attempting to reduce or increase consumption in specific categories (e.g. hottubs, serve…

Not only is it expensive, but uptime since I moved here (3+ years ago) is barely three nines.

Re: Saving Energy: Home Server That Automatically Suspends to RAM and Wakes Up Again

#49
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know why we can't have cheap and efficiently delivered power in California: PG&E has no incentive to deliver such a product. My solution is to run my servers and live life as I please (within some degree of reason), and not look at the power bill too often. In my experience, the monthly charges don't correspond with my actions attempting to reduce or increase consumption in specific categories (e.g. hottubs, serve…

Not only is it expensive, but uptime since I moved here (3+ years ago) is barely three nines.

It depends a lot on the specific area you live in. Down here in the Peninsula, it varies by municipality and 1/4 mile+ zones. The wealthier the area, the more reliable the service. Also, tree limb falls happen.

The jaded side of me attributes this to PG&E executives not wanting to anger the elite powers that be. Atherton service has likely never been affected by the rolling brownouts in summer. Go a mile or three away and it's a very different story.

Re: Saving Energy: Home Server That Automatically Suspends to RAM and Wakes Up Again

#50
post #15

>Why isn't this the default (or at least a configuration option)? Because 1) you still need a second machine to wait for incoming requests, 2) in a server there's no general way to check if the server is serving requests or not. Plex happened to provide an API that specifically does what you needed, but you had to resort to a bit of a hack for Time Machine. This is unlike a desktop context, where you can check if the…

It's also worth mentioning that, by his own admission, OP only managed to save less than 2 euro cents per day (60 / 3360). Maybe he has different ideas, and that's perfectly fine, but personally I value reliability and uptime far more than 2 cents. EDIT: I failed at math. See below comments. :V

Ok, the implementation wasn’t very fantastic cost wise. However I still think this could be a big area of improvement. How can we reduce energy usage of servers?

There’s a lot of work with ARM lately, I’m curious if that could be used in server workloads like this.

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