Energy-hogging Linux, what to do?

[jack at coats.org (Jack Coats)]

I was wanting to fight this battle years ago.  But it came down to the 
manufacturers don't make it because consumers and businesses don't demaind 
it.  Most data centers look like a dead short across the power grid, and the 
electric companies love it.  On big gear you can consume an deasy 2 to 5 KW 
in each rack, a small data center with 100 racks or so, then you have to cool 
it year round, consuming another 10% or the electricity.  But most companies 
are willing to pay for performance and bleading edge.  

Right now for data centers, server consolidation (reducing the number of 
boxes) can save more power than just about anything else.  Also using NAS or 
SAN for servers/applications that don't need huge amounts of space.

In one data center we went an looked up on the vendor web site (IBM in this 
case) power requirements for all the equipment in the data center.  Generated 
a power diagram of the center and figured out what circuits you are 
overheating.

For home use, consider purchasing old laptops with near dead batteries that 
will run off of AC or DC.  If you can get enough that will run off of DC, 
modify a SINGLE nice sized UPS to provide DC instead of AC (or get a 
commercial one if you can at a good price) and run your stuff there.  If you 
have a lot to run, think of using something like VMWare so you can keep down 
the number of different boxes you must run.

If you roll your own boxes, look into the CPU/Memory/Motherboard/peripheral 
power requirements for 'running' and 'standby' mode.  You can cut power by 
selecting the right equipment.

To do a quick energy audit of your own, go snag a clip on amp meter with a 
computer interface (Radio Shack make the one I have, there are probably real 
commercial ones out there too).  Clip it around the hot leg of your 110VAC 
circuit and check the power consumption to find out what your stuff REALLY 
uses.  If you use it with a laptop you can leave with it for a while, it will 
give nice usage graphs.

Some years ago my wife and I got rabid enough about this we monitored 
our 'base' consumption in the house .. we turned off all the lights and 
normal stuff, went away for the weekend, and read the power meter just before 
we drove off, and when we got back, and calculated the number of hours to 
give us our base KWH consumption.  It is higher than you might think.  (GFI 
brakers consume about 3W, TVs turned off consume, Radios, cable modem, 
freezer, refrigerator, the fridge in the garage, security lights, night 
lights, baby monitors, portable telephones (bases and remote chargers), 
battery chargers for tools, vacume cleaners, telephone answering machines, 
etc.).  Then we checked it again with various appliances on after a period of 
use (typically an hour or so, but calculating down to the minute reading the 
house power meter each time).

We determined that it cost about $.50 to run a load of clothes through the 
dryer, $.10 to bake a loaf of bread, ... you get the idea.  And yes, after 
all this we too noticed added cost of having computers on full time.  It is 
better for many computers to be on full time, convenience is better, but the 
cost is pretty high.

Back to your issue, do consider using old laptops as servers.  If you roll 
your own VERY LOW POWER server, post the plans and it will benefit us 
all. :)   If you really need a web server and have cable or DSL, consider 
getting a hosted site and use it.  For us, we reduced our power usage and 
reduced the average noise level in my computer room when I started hosting 
our domain at a hosting company.   I started it after a disk drive died and I 
was frustrated at doing hardware maintenance, so for us, it was a win-win 
(especilly since a friend was starting an ISP locally, so support was really 
great ... he since sold the ISP, so I am about to move my site elsewhere).

---------- Original Message -----------
From: "Rich Braun" <richb at pioneer.ci.net>
To: discuss at blu.org
Sent: Sat, 22 Oct 2005 12:23:22 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Energy-hogging Linux, what to do?

> Call it the Katrina effect:  news headlines about higher natural gas 
> prices coming to your NSTAR bill soon led me to wonder why my 
> electric bills are *SO* high even with all those compact-fluorescent 
> bulbs installed everywhere.  I dug out five years of bills, entered 
> my meter readings into a spreadsheet, and concluded that a 40% jump 
> in household consumption in the fall of 2003 coincided with the 
> addition of a handful of computer components.
> 
> Even at current prices, it looks like my Linux energy bill tops $500 
> per year, out of the $2000 in electric bills.  (I will find out soon,
>  have mail-ordered a couple of Kill-a-Watt consumption meters to 
> plug my systems and appliances into.)  Lord knows what next year's 
> bill will be, if natural gas prices remain 2x what they were pre-Katrina.
> 
> Want to find out how much your nice new Linux server will cost in annual
> electricity consumption, before you buy it?  Sorry, you can't:  no
> manufacturer anywhere posts energy consumption information.  In fact 
> most of 'em try to get you to buy into the whole energy-bloat mantra 
> of more watts
> (isn't a 450W PSU more impressive than a 250W one?) or more gigahertz.
> 
> A little googling leads me down the path of the Via EPIA motherboard,
>  the Pentium M processor, and DC-to-DC converters that run on 12V 
> instead of normal 120V PSU's.  Have yet to figure out how much 
> energy those econobox UPS units are eating up; power efficiency 
> ratings on those are nowhere to be found.  And so it goes:  we 
> Americans happily plug all these things in without a thought to 
> anything other than the $10 we saved shopping around for the lowest 
> purchase price, ignoring the $200 we'll spend each year leaving the thing
> plugged in 24/7.
> 
> So my next server overhaul will include low-power motherboards and 
> DC-DC converter products.  I'm posting here to inspire some 
> discussion on the topic: we like to think we're energy-efficient 
> here in so-called liberal Massachusetts, but when I found out that 
> my Linux boxes were burning my energy than my *car*, I decided it's 
> time to change something.
> 
> Have any of y'all built low-power or solar-powered Linux servers?
> 
> -rich
> 
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------- End of Original Message -------