Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on demand (2023)

Have you measured the power consumption of your "high power consumption" server?

Seriously. You can get running states around 1W these days.

What to do about this? https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/phantom-rtx-5090-high-...

I suggest not putting a ridiculous GPU in your backup server.

My home server setup when running at full tilt consumes approx 160 watts iirc.

I'd love it if I could turn off my systems for when I really need them.

Do you usually run it full tilt? What's it typically using on average? I've forgotten how much mine averages, I only remember being surprised how little it sips because it's mostly idle.

It's surprising because reddit (and HN) would make you think you're throwing away tons of money unless you go with some tiny ARM board and that's not true.

Running states around 1W? How?

Are you talking about processor's C-states? My old 6th gen i3 stays most of the time idling around C8, averaging 5w, really impressive, I suppose newer gens will be even more efficient

Mine idles at around 130W from the walls. I think it's mostly the hard drives, maybe the SAS controller. I've migrated a few services to a miniPC and started turning it off too.

The main issue for me is the heat. I've got it next to me and 130W of heat adds up in the summer.

Only put the RAM you need in the box, use peripherals with working ASPM, attach them to the northbridge PCI ports instead of the CPU's root ports, use wireless instead of wired networking, and don't attach a display.

You can use nvidia-smi to set a target maximum power draw and performance mode to bring idle power levels down. Also make sure your computer is using the server/headless mode driver to keep idle power consumption down.

I do basically all of that, CPU idles around 5% but still consumes over 100W. (Minus the Wireless part)

(5800X + 64GB)

I can enable Eco Mode in the BIOS, which will bring down the CPU to about 65W max although its still at about 100W total system.

Whatever software you are using is totally, utterly broken. Not sure what else I can tell you. Even a completely decked out Ryzen AI Max Pro 395 idles at 5W in Windows S0 (see: https://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/getpdf.aspx/c09133726.pdf)

C8 is a good state if you can get it. Intel is really good at this. They don't even bother energizing the L3 caches immediately when exiting deep package C-states. But there are lots of conditions that will inhibit C8, notably an Ethernet link on a NIC capable of PTP. This is why wireless is better.

If one can afford a GPU with a MSRP of $1999 and was scalped for $2999 during the initial craze, you are probably not struggling to pay your electric bill.

1W is a unicorn as just plugging in a power supply with no PC parts hooked up will register 1W. <10W is more realistic. Select a PC that can run off a laptop charger. Check manufacturer spec sheets for the idle power consumption. Don't install any PCIe cards or hard drives. Use powertop --autotune.

> Select a PC that can run off a laptop charger.

(looking at my 330W laptop charger)

I’m not sure that is the constraint you think it is.

Chiplet based Ryzen CPUs inherently have higher idle power draw. Monolithic chips like 5600G have lower idle power draw. The motherboard, power supply, and internal peripherals all need to be carefully selected to get a really low idle figure.

To be more specific a 65W or 90W laptop power supply.

Not everyone's "home server" is a backup server - some are for AI experiments.

That one should be Wake-On-LAN

Although Intel processors are efficient, modern AMD processors have much higher idle power usage, due to their chiplet design. They typically use at least 20W more power.

I wouldn't want to fiddle with WoL just to get my self-hosted LLM-assisted code-completion working when I pickup my old and underpowered laptop on the couch for some quick hacking. Wake-on-any-network-activity would be perfect, and has superior UX.