I’m wondering what folks do to optimise the power efficiency of their Linux servers. I’ve never really got to the bottom of what is the best way to do this and with the current energy crisis its a pertinent topic.

I’m talking about home servers, so the availability requirements are not the same as in a corporate environment. There might be vast chunks of time during the day or night when they sit idle, and home users are more tolerant of a lag when accessing resources if it means lower energy bills.

Specifically I’ve been thinking about:

  • allowing lower power states when idle
  • spinning-down hdd’s when they’re not in use
  • MAYBE letting machines sleep/hibernate
  • setting schedules of times where you know demand will be low/zero and efficiency can be managed aggressively
  • any other quick wins I’ve missed

It would be amazing if there was one tool or one guide that helps with all of that but thats never the case, is it 😅

Thoughts?

  • teawrecks@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    2·
    6 hours ago

    You might be surprised how little power it’s sipping when sitting idle. Unnecessary disk accesses might be the biggest power use in those hours, but that’s more likely to cost you due to wear and tear and eventual replacement of the drive.

    I recommend buying a Kill-a-watt and monitoring your power consumption on the server for a week or two. Then do some math to see how much it’s actually costing your energy bill. If it’s actually considerable, then try using tools like powertop to see if you can determine what’s generating all the activity.