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

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

#51

Post by rektide »

MBCook wrote: post #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)

The one-liter mini-pc's are incredibly abundant & cheap on tbe used market. They mostly idle.under 10w.

I had some acer chromeboxes that were converted to linux, & those things idled at 5w! had em filled with 32gb ram. amazing little machines. the little i3 and celeron cpus were very weak but still held up well. had almost two years where i used one as my main desktop, literally velcroed to my monitor, but eventually decided the somewhat subpar perf (especially at 4k!) was a bit of a drag.

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

#52

Post by rektide »

i'd love to try to turn a server on every 30s for like 2s then turn it off again. rtcwake could be used for this. dont spin up your platter drives each time though or you might wear em out fast.

the tricky part is that a consumer would have to catch you at just this time. a mdns broadcast being a signal- contact me now- would work, but what apps are going to have that kind of timing built in?

it'd be interesting to see which kinds of protocols would be ok with servers that just keep disappearing. webdav might be fine. smb/cifs would probably throw a fit.

or... ideally the nic could be some kind of smartnic that could stay on & buffer some traffic, keep connections open. i wonder if cxl gear, with multi-host capabilities, might enable this sort of thing.

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

#53

Post by MBCook »

rektide wrote: post #51
MBCook wrote: post #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)

The one-liter mini-pc's are incredibly abundant & cheap on tbe used market. They mostly idle.under 10w. I had some acer chromeboxes that were converted to linux, & those things idled at 5w! had em filled with 32gb ram. amazing little machines. the little i3 and celeron cpus were very weak but still held up well. had almost two years where i used one as my main desktop, literally velcroed to my monitor, but eventually…

The mini is just what I thought of off the top of my head and I know it performs well.

I fixed my post to put the 6 digit I forgot in the Intel mini specs.

You bring up a good point. Some of those little NUC boxes are really low. And a modern Raspberry Pi (if you can find one) is too.

Lots of options.

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

#54

Post by Semaphor »

Heh, my homeserver uses about that much (4W) in idle ;) 2 SSDs, 8 GB RAM and a passively cooled J4125, more than enough for what I need (2-person household). It also runs Home Assistant, so I can’t let it go to sleep, anyway.

I have an extra Pi4 with Proxmox Backup Server, that could actually sleep most of the time as it backups only twice a day. But even with German electricity prices, a Pi4 with a single SSD is not exactly expensive. Still, maybe I’ll look into that.

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

#55

Post by themitigating »

runnerup wrote: post #40
judge2020 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And doing this is not going to largely affect the energy usage of the EU - at least, in comparison to, say, Dell putting Platinum rated PSUs in their workstations and AMD making good server chips that are twice as efficient at the same performance point as Intel's chips.

Or the energy usage of Germany’s chemicals industry…

Or the cost of running water pumps for public fountains

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

#56

Post by bboygravity »

runnerup wrote: post #40
judge2020 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And doing this is not going to largely affect the energy usage of the EU - at least, in comparison to, say, Dell putting Platinum rated PSUs in their workstations and AMD making good server chips that are twice as efficient at the same performance point as Intel's chips.

Or the energy usage of Germany’s chemicals industry…

Or the energy useage of 1 metal smelter.

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

#57

Post by wackget »

Most BIOSes have an option to "Wake on LAN" or "Wake on Magic Packet" which will allow you to wake the computer via a network message.

On Windows you can use WakeMeOnLAN: https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/wake_on_lan.html

`WakeMeOnLAN.exe /WakeUp [name]`

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

#58

Post by lttlrck »

paranoidrobot wrote: post #39
JesusLovesEwe wrote: post #18

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?

Reverse proxy means that your pi now has to handle all the traffic for Plex and any other services. It could also make other things difficult like CIFS/whatever else you're hosting. Depending on what Pi you're using, it's networking is over USB, and so is quite performance constrained.

Maybe use local DNS with a very low TTL. Send WOL on DNS request.

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

#60

Post by blindriver »

metadat wrote: 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. :)

If I charge my EV at home, within a week I'm in Tier 3. That's 0.49/kWh. On some other plans, the electricity rate is 0.55/kWh at some time periods.
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