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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

#181

Post by eternityforest »

simongray wrote: post #84
eternityforest wrote: post #70

Smartphones can be connected for days on the internal battery, using well under a watt, and they can be ready to respond instantly, and they have an app container system that makes everything just work. I really think we need to start making Android servers a thing, at least for self hosting, maybe for everything. Judging by how WearOS seems to be able to run on 35mA or less, I think there's a good case for just maki…

Raspberry Pis (and similar devices) already work great as low-power servers. The big issue is the home server community being overly focused on creating "battle stations" that look cool and run 40 different Docker containers rather than simple low-power solutions.

Pi doesn't work that great, power consumption is still several watts, too much for batteries to be cheap and compact if you want a day or two of backup, plus self hosting in general is very much enthusiasts only.

Android does what Docker does while remaining very low power, because it gives you one standard API level, rather than some minimal syscalls and you have to bring all your own libraries right in the container.

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

#182

Post by gsich »

weberer wrote: post #164
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. :)

Germany made the silly decision in 2011 to shut down their existing nuclear reactors, and build more natural gas plants to import cheap, natural gas from Russia. Then after Russia's second invasion of Ukraine last year, the gas got cut off. Overall, it was a pretty bad idea that most people should have saw coming since Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014. https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr.…

True, but the high prices mostly come from company greed. They were insanely high even before that.

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

#183

Post by gsich »

Dalewyn wrote: post #7
deadbeeves wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never had any issues with stand-by on Windows.

Windows in particular is notorious as of late for brutally draining the battery while Sleeping[1]. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHKKcd3sx2c

But it's not sleeping.

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

#184

Post by gsich »

deadbeeves wrote: post #4
Dalewyn wrote: post #3

>Why isn't this build into every major operating system by now? Because no desktop OS besides MacOS can handle Sleep with any semblance of competency. >Why isn't this the default See above.

I've never had any issues with stand-by on Windows.

Same. At least not on desktop machines.

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

#186

Post by pulketo »

You should also electrically fix your VAr, i'm not fresh with my electronics knowledge but VAr (Volt-Ampers Reactive) has no effect electrically on equipment (those are waste) because you are billed by the resultant vector of the sum of Watts (work) + VAr (Waste) = Tariff Bill

I guess the cheapest way to improve power factor is a cappacitive bank more info: https://fortop.co.uk/knowledge/white-papers/reactive-power-r...

About your monitoring command: lsof -w /mnt/* | grep /mnt/ | wc -l Have you taken a look into incrontab, maybe it's more cpu efficient, but i don't know, so you could take a look into it.

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

#187

Post by danans »

Dalewyn wrote: post #82
danans wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because no desktop OS besides MacOS can handle Sleep with any semblance of competency. The Chromebook I'm using right now handles sleep perfectly, and always has.

I said desktop OS. :V

There is no significant difference between "desktop" MacOS and laptop MacOS with respect to power management.

Similarly, Chromebox desktops exist, running effectively the same OS as laptop ChromeOS.

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

#188

Post by eternityforest »

michaelt wrote: post #126
RussianCow wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The power saving is not because of Android it is because of the ARM arch being used under the hood. [citation needed] Based on my understanding, the underlying OS has way more to do with power usage than the instruction set, and AFAIK Android has tons of optimizations specifically geared towards reducing battery consumption (and therefore power usage) on mobile devices. With that said, it's true that, in practice,…

It's both, if you want to achieve the goal of operating for multiple days on the battery. A modern battery powered device will have a 'sleep mode' where the current consumption is measured in microamps; and an operating mode where the current consumption is many times higher. Battery life relies on two things: Firstly, the sleep and operating modes being as efficient as possible (the CPU design) and second of all get…

Not having a screen is another blocker for self hosting some of the time.

It means you have to enable SSH with some file in a directory, then SSH in, make sure you have a strong password, turn SSH off when you're done, maybe copy and paste or SCP a key somewhere.

With a screen you don't depend on the state of anything else to do admin. Your more savvy relatives can install things for you without them needing the special paired remote admin app.

And of course, you can do "Scan to get started" QR setup.

Plus, in a real consumer self hosting scenario, it would make sense for the server to also be the smart display if you want one, to avoid needing more devices, and keeping the screen would mean developers don't have to explicitly code from both screenful and screenless setups, sometimes things that shouldn't depend on the screen do unnecessarily.

On Linux stuff works differently if you run as a service vs under the DE, because you're missing some environment variable that points to dbus or whatever, and you need extra work to get around it.

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

#189

Post by zombielinux »

tails4e wrote: post #117
guilamu wrote: post #100

Something's not right. I own both a passively cooled 2016 Mini PC OLOEY Intel Core i7-7500U (as a home media center) and a 2023 Minisforum UM690 (for work and it's amazing btw), and they both use about 7 watts when idling (screen off). How op is using 43 watts for an idling media center is just beyond me, he must be using a 1978 Intel 8086, right? Anyhow, 4 watts is still far better than 7 watts and this is a great a…

I have a 5 year old home server I'd love to replace as it idles at 40w, while an old laptop that could do the job idles at 12w. What I'd like to do is merge that and my old NAS, so ideally somethig with a few sata slots, m2 ssd, and low idle power. Any recommendations for this?

If you find something with thunderbolt, you can get an external controller in there via thunderbolt->pcie. But between that power draw, and the draw of the drives, you'll be bumping close enough to 40w that it'd be a wash.

I do this math myself every few months and ultimately, it seems for a large nas/server, 40-50W is about as low as you can idle.

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

#190

Post by ndriscoll »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #113
sandos wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My desktop PCs have always been idling at more than 50W. Granted, my newest one is from 2011 or so.

I don't think it has improved much. No one has been benchmarking these metrics for desktop PCs for a decade or so, so they have gotten worse, if anything. I have not yet found any LGA 1700 motherboard were the total idle power would be less than 25W, for example. I find that the power supply inefficiency by itself, even on standby , is usually already 2W -- larger than some of the alternatives discussed here. I have…

There's a German forum where they've been crowdsourcing this info for a few years[0]. According to their spreadsheet[1] there's a few systems with 12th gen Intel cpus with [0] https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/die-sparsamste...

[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LHvT2fRp7I6Hf18LcSzs...

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