Comment on New server sanity check
tal@lemmy.today 8 months ago
Not saying getting smaller hardware is the wrong move, but have you tried just reducing power with software on your existing machine?
I mean, if you’re happy with it other than on idle power usage, I imagine that one can probably do things like:
Set a power-down time using hdparm on the rotational drives, so that disks that you aren’t using spin down.
Run # powertop --auto-tune.
Run # powerprofilesctl set power-saver if you’re using power-profiles-daemon.
I dunno if and how Xeon on Linux exposes any ability to force a core to power down, but maybe # cat 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/online and so forth.
I imagine that it’s probably possible to lower the minimum fan speed in whatever hardware control Dell provides.
The 720 is not going to benefit from power savings, even going to hot-spare for the power supplies. These things are relics from the time when power was cheap.
I couldn’t get my r720 down below 160w, which is unacceptable for just running some containers.
I know, having had one, that you can set a power budget… but it’s going to clock your CPUs all the way down and still run at least 120W with horrible performance.
rimu@piefed.social 8 months ago
Data center servers are a different breed. I got an old one for cheap once and only ran it for a few minutes because it sounded like a jet engine. No way to make that thing efficient.