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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

#211

Post by ilyt »

pja wrote: post #97
aequitas wrote: post #90

If you're penny pinching also have a look at your network equipment. As a test I set all switch ports on my 24 port HP from 1Gbps to 100Mbps and the power usage dropped by 10W. About half the ports on the switch are occupied. But then again, with the current prices it might make more sense just to replace the hardware with a newer more efficient model and it will pay itself back in a year instead of 5.

This is an example of where getting rid of old kit & replacing it with new more power efficient hardware ends up being the greener option.

eeeeeh probably putting the money into getting solar panel would be a better deal eco-wise

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

#212

Post by Gasp0de »

eptcyka wrote: post #158
Gasp0de wrote: post #156

My old laptop is more than powerful enough for Plex and backups, and idles at around 3W. Why someone would use a desktop PC as a home server in Europe is beyond me.

I'd love to run a laptop, but I've yet to see good, cheap used laptops with ECC memory support.

Why do you need ECC memory for a home server? What's the use case?

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

#213

Post by Gasp0de »

dingaling wrote: post #157
Gasp0de wrote: post #156

My old laptop is more than powerful enough for Plex and backups, and idles at around 3W. Why someone would use a desktop PC as a home server in Europe is beyond me.

Often because they need more than one disk installed. You could use a NAS, but then you've cost and additional energy consumption.

My Laptop has a Sata connection inside. Also, USB3 is fast enough. And even an additional nas only consumes 10-20W.

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

#214

Post by bayindirh »

ilyt wrote: post #210
bayindirh wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have found that a 30 to 60 minute sleep time-out provides the perfect balance for infrequently used disks in terms of silence/power savings and longevity.

Interestingly, one of my wireless routers with a USB port had a bug, and allowed a disk to sleep and cause it to wake afterwards. This made the disk overflow its SMART start/stop counter (so it's >65536, possibly double that number), yet the disk is still working at full performance to this day, and shows no performance degradation either. It's a Seagate notebook hard drive converted to an external drive (Seagate Expansion Portable, or something like that).

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

#215

Post by ilyt »

bayindirh wrote: post #214
ilyt wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I have found that a 30 to 60 minute sleep time-out provides the perfect balance for infrequently used disks in terms of silence/power savings and longevity. Interestingly, one of my wireless routers with a USB port had a bug, and allowed a disk to sleep and cause it to wake afterwards. This made the disk overflow its SMART start/stop counter (so it's >65536, possibly double that number), yet the disk is still working…

I remember having bad experience once one of our guys decided "hey, it's backup server, we can just put some of the greens in it, backups are run all in bulk right?".

Think 2/3 out of them died in a year, we preemptively replaced the rest.

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

#216

Post by b3lvedere »

t0mas88 wrote: post #169
b3lvedere wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the idea. Currently i have a Raspberry Pi3 with an external USB-SATA 1TB disk connected which is on 24/7 doing stuff like PiHole, Navidrome, etc. I wonder if putting that all on a fairly new laptop with all the energy savings enabled would actually be more energy efficient.

Even on a fairly old one (my "home server laptop" is 8 years old) it's really close in terms of power usage. And the laptop is much faster than the Raspberry and usually comes with fast SSD storage built in.

I'm still in doubt. I don't really need a huge performance boost, though the 1Gbps Ethernet connection of a laptop would be nice.

According to specs my Pi 3 takes 5.1V and 2.5A which is 12.75Watt. An HP (Probook 650 G3) laptop takes 19.5V and 2.31A which is 45.045Watt.

I know it does not eat up all that maximum power, but i still wonder if even the best power saving options would make it less than 12,75Watt.

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

#217

Post by bayindirh »

ilyt wrote: post #215
bayindirh wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have found that a 30 to 60 minute sleep time-out provides the perfect balance for infrequently used disks in terms of silence/power savings and longevity. Interestingly, one of my wireless routers with a USB port had a bug, and allowed a disk to sleep and cause it to wake afterwards. This made the disk overflow its SMART start/stop counter (so it's >65536, possibly double that number), yet the disk is still working…

I remember having bad experience once one of our guys decided "hey, it's backup server, we can just put some of the greens in it, backups are run all in bulk right?". Think 2/3 out of them died in a year, we preemptively replaced the rest.

Greens are not designed for that kind of duty. Also they have variable speed spindles and variable speed seek to keep noise down.

My parents' PC has a 1.5TB Green for backups for almost a decade now, and that drive is fine, too.

Looks like it's mostly a horses for courses matter.

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

#218

Post by corv »

eternityforest wrote: post #179
corv wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

As I see it there's a few missing features, and they need to be solved anyway to make self hosting less painful in general, right now I don't see many good ways to do it at all unless you like stuff that unpredictabily needs maintenance. Play store needs to be split into provider and interface APIs, so you can add your own repos and still have it work with existing tools. Remote management needs to be a thing for sur…

Thank you for your input, lots to digest here!

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

#219

Post by yencabulator »

judge2020 wrote: post #72
deadbeeves wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most effective way is to be able to dynamically distribute load across a large array of servers, turning some off at times of lower load. Anyone who runs a large datacenter probably already does this or something equivalent, either to save money or to service more customers with the same amount of hardware. It's more effective to optimize the hardware architecture, but it's worth noting that improvements in effic…

> Anyone who runs a large datacenter probably already does this or something equivalent, either to save money or to service more customers with the same amount of hardware. Possibly, but few cloud providers actually do live migration[0] since it's risky to pause a VM for typically less than 1 second, but up to 5 seconds. 0: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/live-migrati...

Real world pause times for live migration are mostly imperceptibly small. Like, you might as well have a router glitch for the same whatever milliseconds.

To demonstrate Ceph RBD network block storage back in the day, I ran VNC sessions to two libvirt hosts and live migrated a full VM with a desktop and a bouncing ball animation in a window between the two hosts & VNC sessions. The only thing a human could perceive was that the desktop image in one VNC window goes black, and the animation continues in the other.

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

#220

Post by yencabulator »

kiririn wrote: post #202
corv wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Or a timer/smart plug on the outlet that keeps the battery from being 100% charged all the time.

It'd be nice if things had logic to control their own charging -- start charging only when the battery drops below 40%, stop charging when you hit 90%. The hardware can do that already.

(And then you can expect something like normal phone battery lifetime, which is still limited.)

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