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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

#201

Post by RussianCow »

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…

> Firstly, the sleep and operating modes being as efficient as possible (the CPU design)

My point is that this part doesn't really have much to do with the instruction set, though. Theoretically, there's no reason you couldn't design an x86 CPU that is just as efficient as an ARM one (or at least, within spitting distance); it's just not done because the economics wouldn't make sense.

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

#202

Post by kiririn »

corv wrote: post #88
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…

Android servers - I've heard this idea before and I'm genuinely curious what it would take to make Android less painful for self-hosting. Currently automatic updates are an issue and remote management needs work. What else am I missing?

Battery will be a spicy pillow in a year or two of 24/7 usage. It’s accelerating the wear to considerably more than a heavy user or shop demo model

Need a phone that works with the battery removed or a fake battery

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

#203

Post by paranoidrobot »

nullify88 wrote: post #67
paranoidrobot wrote: post #6

Interesting solution. I wonder if you could make the 'wake up' a bit more advanced. Run tcpdump or something similar on the Pi, with a filter set for inbound packets to the media server on ports that Plex or Time Machine uses. If it sees those packets, send the WoL magic packet. This might not work if your switch does proper port isolation - but you could perhaps add port mirroring or something like that.

Perhaps using something like keepalived on your server and Pi could be useful here. When the server is off the ip will failover to the Pi to receive server traffic to know when to power on the server. Once the request comes in and the pi powers on the server, it'll come active again and recieve the IP while the pi goes in to standby. That way the Pi doesnt need to be in the read or write path.

keepalived seems like a great idea.

I'm not sure how Plex clients would handle it, but putting an nginx server with the same certificates and just returning HTTP 429 (Too Fast) or 500's and a "Please try again in 1 minute" response, along with sending the magic packet would work great for most HTTP based things.

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

#204

Post by Semaphor »

icecrash wrote: post #200
Semaphor wrote: post #54

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…

Which box did you buy? Sounds like a nice setup (4W, passively cooled, 2 SSD slots).

A refurbished Fujitsu FUTRO S740 thin client, it has one SATA m.2 slot, and I replaced the Wi-Fi m.2 with an adapter for an extra NVMe. They are pretty big in Germany as small homeservers, because there are a lot of used ones around (I paid 44€ for the 8 GB version). There’s an overview [0] page for them, and a list of power measurements [1], both in German, though.

[0]: https://github.com/R3NE07/Futro-S740/blob/main/README.md

[1]: https://github.com/R3NE07/Futro-S740/blob/main/power_consump...

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

#205

Post by Tijdreiziger »

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?

Maybe a QNAP box? I think they're just PC's, so you can just wipe QNAP's OS and install whatever you want (unlike some other NAS vendors).

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

#206

Post by GabeIsko »

Just wanted to chime in and say that I get excellent results with a laptop homeserver. I haven't tried to hard looking into it's exact power consumption, but for the load I use it for it seems to be negligible. I'm not streaming media too frequently on it though. It sits at ~95% idle on average according to powertop.

Anecdotally, the costs from this website (https://ecocostsavings.com/how-many-watts-does-a-laptop-use/) seem to check out based on what I observed. Idk the model # off the top of my head, but it is a lower end hp laptop my friend sold me running debian.

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

#207

Post by Dalewyn »

jeffbee wrote: post #194
Dalewyn wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even desktop CPUs, at least Intel ones, sip power when idle (anecdote: my 12700K sips around 7W when idle).

If that's the CPU's own power consumption as measured by the CPU something is broken in your system or you have redefined "idle". When these things hit PC6—all cores off, caches off, iGPU refresh off—they should fall below 1W. This is a typical idle state for a desktop computer that is nominally "on" but nothing is happening.

Idle as in sitting on the desktop doing practically nothing except for very minor and insignificant background tasks.

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

#208

Post by ilyt »

eternityforest wrote: post #174
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but Android is just based on Linux, so in theory you could tweak a regular Linux server on ARM hardware to get good energy efficiency. The downside of Android is its reliance on Java, which adds a lot of overhead compared to bare-metal languages (I strongly believe - but have no sources or figures to back this up - this is why Apple phones have been faster and more energy efficient, especially in the earlier days (th…

Android has the NDK now, it can run native code with only tiny headers of java to launch it, plus ART compiles the Java anyway as I understand it. Regular Linux could be tweaked, but I think it would be way easier to start on Android and add all the missing stuff you want for a server, than to start on Linux. Regular Linux still uses a bit more power, and they don't have any kind of container+sandbox that works quite…

> Regular Linux could be tweaked, but I think it would be way easier to start on Android and add all the missing stuff you want for a server, than to start on Linux.

I severely doubt it.

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

#209

Post by ilyt »

guilamu wrote: post #129
hddherman wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found that most desktop PC-s have idle power usage around 35-50W. That was the main motivation to look for alternative solutions like ASRock Deskmini, or the Dell/HP/Lenovo TinyMiniMicro form factor machines. Mini PC-s tend to have great idle power usage compared to big towers, which is probably down to the selection of the CPU, components on the motherboard and the power supply which usually has to only output…

You're right, using a desktop CPU for a mediacenter is not a good idea. Laptop CPUs are, however, really well optimised for very low consumption when idling and that's what you should be using for a mediacenter. Also, IMHO, ASRock Deskmini would not be a good idea for a media center since it's using desktop CPUs. The idle power draw will not be as good as mini pc with a laptop CPU.

Then you need to look at motherboard power usage, that's another huge difference if CPU is already taking just few watts

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

#210

Post by ilyt »

bayindirh wrote: post #106
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…

Probably a combination of wrong configuration of CPU scheduler and not sleeping hard drives. Some of the hard drives do not advertise their sleep capabilities over SATA, and hdparm ignores these drives unless you force for sleep.

And it generally lowers longevity if disks are slept and woken up constantly.
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