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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

#141

Post by piaste »

Semaphor wrote: post #136
piaste wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For those who go, "but I need real power" There's also the flip side, which is "well since I already have real power..." I.e., like many HNers, I own a powerful coding/gaming Linux desktop with plenty of HDD space, which gets regularly backed up to cold storage. It does however use a frankly obscene 90W when idling, due to the GPU, fans, and multiple hard drives and peripherals. Building a separate, power-efficient…

FWIW, everything added together for my homeserver in the parent comment was about €120 ;) With the 0.4€/kWh that I pay here, that’s worth it quite quickly.

How much storage do you have? That's typically the biggest expense as you put more stuff on your server (i.e. media, both upload and download).

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

#142

Post by trialect »

deadbeeves wrote: post #8

>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…

What?

Synology DS413 and DS213+ does this automatically. What second machine?

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

#143

Post by gruturo »

vonseel wrote: post #122
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…

Europe energy prices :/ Here in Texas it cost maybe $5/month to run a 45 watt little server (pc)…

Consider yourself lucky - in Germany we're talking 20 EUR/month for a constant 45W load.

On the other hand, if you can, please consider using a more energy efficient alternative (and/or ensure you're getting the electricity from green sources) - the planet will warm up regardless of whether the electricity was cheap or expensive.

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

#144

Post by londons_explore »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #101
Dalewyn wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are, in fact, correct. I have no idea why I converted 140 days into hours... Still, my point remains unchanged: I, at least, value reliability and uptime more than ~43 euro cents.

43 cents / day is >150 a year, that's not to be sniffed at. Actually, at 150 / year you can rent a VPS (or two!) as well, always-on etc, which... kinda shows how skewed consumer price for electricity is.

your VPS will have a shared CPU with hundreds of other customers... So will probably be using far less power (for you) than your home server.

In Europe at least, most industrial users were paying more for electricity than residential users over the winter (gas shortage). Governments subsidized residential users more than most businesses.

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

#145

Post by londons_explore »

I'd kinda like all machines to do this all the time...

The OS should go to sleep, and give the network hardware enough info to respond to simple requests (ie. maybe ARP requests, mDNS, and keeping a DHCP lease alive). Anything that comes in addressed to the machine that can't be handled by the network hardware should wake the machine, leaving the packet in a buffer for the machine to handle and then go back to sleep.

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

#146

Post by londons_explore »

londons_explore wrote: post #145

I'd kinda like all machines to do this all the time... The OS should go to sleep, and give the network hardware enough info to respond to simple requests (ie. maybe ARP requests, mDNS, and keeping a DHCP lease alive). Anything that comes in addressed to the machine that can't be handled by the network hardware should wake the machine, leaving the packet in a buffer for the machine to handle and then go back to sleep.

The OS the one-laptop-per-child machine used was capable of this - it could sleep, with the screen either on or off, between keystrokes and network packets. Lots of the network stack was moved into the always-on network hardware, so it could for example participate in the mesh network while powered off.

Sadly the whole project folded (for mostly non-tech reasons), taking most of it's cool tech with it.

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

#147

Post by Dalewyn »

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.

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

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

#148

Post by londons_explore »

londons_explore wrote: post #145

I'd kinda like all machines to do this all the time... The OS should go to sleep, and give the network hardware enough info to respond to simple requests (ie. maybe ARP requests, mDNS, and keeping a DHCP lease alive). Anything that comes in addressed to the machine that can't be handled by the network hardware should wake the machine, leaving the packet in a buffer for the machine to handle and then go back to sleep.

Android can do this - the linux kernel goes into suspend-to-ram while the network is still up. If someone sends you a tweet, the cloud messaging service wakes the OS with a TCP packet, which eventually causes the "ding" notification that Musk has said something again...

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

#149

Post by imhoguy »

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…

Termux works great as a server environment really. The trickiest part is to start phone without old battery and actually have automatic booting after power outage.

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

#150

Post by trialect »

joking wrote: post #116
forty wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a HP Microserver N40L with 4 spinning disks. Last time I measured, I'm pretty sure it was consuming around 40W. I guess CPUs have gotten better in the last 10 years ;)

I have a synology nas and is unable to stop the spinning disks. A shame, every other thing in it is nice, but could have beter optimizations, as the disk are the most of its energy consumption.

I also have a Synology nas, a DS413 for 10 years now.

and I use it like this also for 10 years now. It works great. Only consumes ~4W in deep sleep/system hibernation (the wording depends on from which year you find text mentioning the above nas. Synology decided to reword the function back in some year), and automatically wakes up whenever it is needed. (also not this is not only HDD sleep, it is full system sleep)

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