LinuxMCE Forums
General => Users => Topic started by: gletscher on September 15, 2007, 06:06:53 pm
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When a have one of these full enterprise grade servers running 24/7h as core, what will the energy consumption be ? Will the go to a low energy standby, or is it possible to use linuxbios which should boot in 3 secs to console + wakeonlan with some sort of lan-remote to turn it on ?
Any Energy saving ideas around ?
Greetings
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I thought I answered this already but I may have clicked the wrong button.
1) Core power usage (just measured) Asus M2NPV-VM AMD 4200 1 GB ram 80 GB HDD 65W idle and up to 95W playing HD video content.
I looked at Linuxbios and its interesting but no support for any of the hardware currently used for LMCE. And making a new BIOS looks pretty scary, don't want to toast a motherboard or processor.
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thats a hell lot of energy, my notebook running complete inc. screen takes 20W, i dont mind a the energy level during playback, just wondering how to reduce the idle one, its like having a lightbulb glowing day and night all the time ..
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I'm currently trying out the low power chip from AMD with a motherboard that has killer onboard video. I'll let you know power and pull numbers from it once it's up and going, but I'm expecting 20w less consumption off peak. Hopefully this'll be half a lightbulb on average!-RH
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The power consumption comes from supporting HD playback with a video system really oriented to Gaming.
The Via EPIA EX does most of the same using around 15W. Except an orbiter rebuild will take 10 times as long. And forget multiple streams from the server. They make good clients (if the video is working) but there are still bugs in the advanced playback. And Via's support is directly related to how much sales they expect to get for doing the work. The Vista support has 10X the engineers that Linux has.
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The Via EPIA EX does most of the same using around 15W. Except an orbiter rebuild will take 10 times as long. And forget multiple streams from the server. They make good clients (if the video is working) but there are still bugs in the advanced playback. And Via's support is directly related to how much sales they expect to get for doing the work. The Vista support has 10X the engineers that Linux has.
Interesting! From the picture it looks like Fiire MDs are based on EPIA EX.
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The Via EPIA EX does most of the same using around 15W. Except an orbiter rebuild will take 10 times as long. And forget multiple streams from the server. They make good clients (if the video is working) but there are still bugs in the advanced playback. And Via's support is directly related to how much sales they expect to get for doing the work. The Vista support has 10X the engineers that Linux has.
Interesting! From the picture it looks like Fiire MDs are based on EPIA EX.
The EX15000G works great by the way using either the Openchrome or Unichrome Pro drivers... but only under UI1 and will not support UI2 with those drivers. They are no bugs that I am aware of that are specific to the Via's. Fiire ship their Fiirestations with commercial Unichrome Pro II drivers from Via so that they can support the needs of UI2 ie alpha blending etc
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The EX15000G works great by the way using either the Openchrome or Unichrome Pro drivers... but only under UI1 and will not support UI2 with those drivers. They are no bugs that I am aware of that are specific to the Via's. Fiire ship their Fiirestations with commercial Unichrome Pro II drivers from Via so that they can support the needs of UI2 ie alpha blending etc
Good to know that! I was considering EX15000G for my MDs, because of their lower power consumption and fan-less or at least quiet operation.
Can individuals buy Unichrome Pro II drivers from Via or is it licensed only for OEM?
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The EX15000G works great by the way using either the Openchrome or Unichrome Pro drivers... but only under UI1 and will not support UI2 with those drivers. They are no bugs that I am aware of that are specific to the Via's. Fiire ship their Fiirestations with commercial Unichrome Pro II drivers from Via so that they can support the needs of UI2 ie alpha blending etc
Good to know that! I was considering EX15000G for my MDs, because of their lower power consumption and fan-less or at least quiet operation.
Can individuals buy Unichrome Pro II drivers from Via or is it licensed only for OEM?
As far as I know they are only available to OEM's. Why this is I am not sure... but that seems to be the situation at present.
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Totallymaxed
Can you post instructions for installing the openchrome and unichrome drivers? The openchrome drivers are not easy but doable it seems, the unichrome driver from Via has really bad directions and quite a few unexplained options.
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I'm currently trying out the low power chip from AMD with a motherboard that has killer onboard video. I'll let you know power and pull numbers from it once it's up and going, but I'm expecting 20w less consumption off peak. Hopefully this'll be half a lightbulb on average!-RH
Care to share what you're HW setup is?
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Hello,
I'm also looking at the un-green-ness of mutliple 24/7 servers in the house.
The kubuntu server that hosts the lmce core seems a logical box for consolidating other servers (samba pdc / ipcop, etc) and I've described some thoughs here:
http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=2522
Overall goal is to reduce wasteful power consumption and reduce O&M overhead.
thanks,
joseph
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Energy consumption is definitely a concern.
The usage of a power hungry core or director is cost prohibitive.
I'd rather spend the $$$ up front on a power miser core or director that may cost me more in the initial hardware startup costs but save me $$$ over time.
You guys tweaked my interest on this. I have a system on 24/7 for torrents, problem is it's a P4 2.8Ghz, 450 watt PS with torrents being written to 1-4 hard disks at a time.
I'm going to consolidate my Harddisks, get one larger one rather than 4 smaller ones(because I had them handy). This should use less power.
I'm also going to setup a separate machine just for torrents, something not very fast, just the bare minimum, with integrated 10/100, 1 Harddisk, no Graphics card, I'll remotely administer the system. It'll run on an older 300W power supply or even less.
Better yet, does anyone know of a torrent client built into a Router firmware?
The core will only come online when I need it, to watch movies, etc.
Anyone else have a similar idea?
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this has bit torrent.
http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/08/planex-mz-04g-router-sports-usb-bittorrent-compatibility/ (http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/08/planex-mz-04g-router-sports-usb-bittorrent-compatibility/)
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la Fonera from the FON Wlan community has an integrated bittorrent client, they were giving away these boxes for free here in germany
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I'm also concerned about power consumption and looking for ways to decrease it.
Majority of smart home community is talking about power usage reductions cause of its "smart" features, but if we put power hungry PCs in them, then it is hard to talk about energy efficiency.
I have put even Mobile procesor in my asus p4p800 e-deluxe board some year or two ago, to minimize consumption, but it didn't help much (that adapter doesn't let voltage scaling of procesor that can now be done on newer processors).
I identify several bigger groups of power hungry details :
- processor by itself in idle mode - majority of "away" state, LMCE will be doing only video surveillance, maybe mythtv record and nothing else. In such state it would be wise to use as little as possible resources... I remember that some kind of voltage/frequency scaling daemons (cpufreqd?) were around to take advantage of newer processors features to cut down power usage to bare minimum for current resource needs. Anyone more familiar if those daemons still exist in some newer form and if they are active by default ?
- disks - we have large spinning disks in Cores. Currently also there is a problem of logs - they are mostly still outputting a lot of informations in them, so logging disk is in constant use. But in my core, I use separate disk with media that could be spinned down during non-media-needed intervals.
Anyone more familiar with spinning disks down etc... ?
- screen saver - we have quite CPU intensive screen saver, that doesn't do its job by definition (screen & power saver? ). Maybe it could be activated only during idle in one of "home" modes and not when in "away" mode, cause at that time nobody is at home...
I have a energy consumption meter, but older HW, so cannot do usefull measurements, but would be more than happy if we can start new page on Wiki about this problem and post solutions, opinions and findings there ....
Thanks in advance for cooperation,
regards,
Bulek.
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You can set disk drives to spin down automaticly with "hdparm" (see the man page for details).
I would like for LMCE to set the screen (VGA monitor in this specific case) to stand by after 10 or 15 minutes of showing the screen saver. That works when KDE is using the screen, but something is preventing it when the orbitter is using the display. Any thoughts?
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The idea I had was to use sleep mode. If we can find a way to program a button from the infrared remote to get the pc into s3 mode it will save a lot of energy. Then options like wake on lan will ensure that the core will come online again when needed...
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The idea I had was to use sleep mode. If we can find a way to program a button from the infrared remote to get the pc into s3 mode it will save a lot of energy. Then options like wake on lan will ensure that the core will come online again when needed...
Well I thought and tried a lot for sleep mode. If you only need core for media and things when you're home that's ok, but not if you run telephony and video surveillance. Also AFAIK, systems going into and coming out of sleep state are not so reliable, so it can quite easily happen that it won't wake up anymore.... But sleep mode is more perfect for MDs.
So I guess all features of scaling CPU voltage and frequency should be exploited and spinning disk down, I guess idle consumption should be very low. But I just don't know how far can one go under current version of Kernel and KUbuntu.
Regards,
Bulek.
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Hi,
I have the same concerns about the energy consumption of a core that is left on 24/7.
What I am trying to do is put together a Core/Hybrid that run on a Core Duo laptop Processor to minimise processor power consumption, I currently have a t2300 (1.6Ghz x2) with a TDP of 34w, but I am currently looking on ebay for a low voltage version which should bring the TDP down to 15w.
My plan is to then have 2.5" laptop processor running the operating system and LinuxMCE (and perhaps mp3) then additional 3.5" discs for the other media and spin them down when not in use.
The current system I have is:-
Motherboard - MSI Speedster A4R (Intel i945 chipset, Socket 479)
Processor - T2300 (1.6 GHz x2, 2Mb L2 cache, 34w TDP)
Memory - 2GB 667Mhz DDR2
Can not give you any total system consumption figures yet as I am new to Linux/LinuxMCE and I am having difficulties getting the system working. Initial install goes find and I get the system all up and running but when I try to add the remote, CCTV capture card or DVB card I always end up with 'Failed to regen orbiter'. Once I get that sorted I can give you details of the consumption.
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1. Spin down
The problem I have found with trying to spin down disks is there are a lot of processes reading and writing to the disks. It is not even possible to spin down my media-only disks for more than a minute as things like the updatemedia daemon spin them back up again.
2. Power consumption
My core is constantly running at 50% sys CPU use (in top) on an XP-M 2500+. I have done some searching and it appears this is a kernel bug, related to the SMP option being enabled for a non SMP processor. I cannot however recompile the kernel as I believe it is copied to the MDs, one of which is SMP. Correct me if I'm wrong however...
Chris
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1. Spin down
The problem I have found with trying to spin down disks is there are a lot of processes reading and writing to the disks. It is not even possible to spin down my media-only disks for more than a minute as things like the updatemedia daemon spin them back up again.
2. Power consumption
My core is constantly running at 50% sys CPU use (in top) on an XP-M 2500+. I have done some searching and it appears this is a kernel bug, related to the SMP option being enabled for a non SMP processor. I cannot however recompile the kernel as I believe it is copied to the MDs, one of which is SMP. Correct me if I'm wrong however...
Chris
I have also got some more informations :
1. spin down - disks have only limited number of spin down/up cycles so I guess it should be needed carefully. There are special tools to determine which processes are accessing disk to prevent spinning up too fast. But as usual. I forgot where :-). But as far as I remember 2.6.21 kernel would be more suitable for such tasks.
HTH,
Bulek.
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I thought I answered this already but I may have clicked the wrong button.
1) Core power usage (just measured) Asus M2NPV-VM AMD 4200 1 GB ram 80 GB HDD 65W idle and up to 95W playing HD video content.
I looked at Linuxbios and its interesting but no support for any of the hardware currently used for LMCE. And making a new BIOS looks pretty scary, don't want to toast a motherboard or processor.
r u use the cpufreqd-t?
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I measured the power with a precision Wattmeter at the AC in. Includes everything in the box.
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basic tip:
if you have an overclocking friendly motherboard it is also often possible to under-volt the processor,
a moderate undervolting (increase the undervolting every re-boot, until errors start popping up) will, even on a desktop processor give a 15-20 watt decrease in energy consumption.
your results will vary depending on your processor, motherboard and god's will.
laptop processors will take to this really well, as well as 'energy efficient' processors. just DO NOT try to install LMCE OR ANY OS on an over or under-clocked system. you'll regret it and waste hundreds of hours of time sorting out problems that were caused by components working outside spec (installing an OS is much more sensitive to errors then at any other point in a systems life)
personal experience has taught me that, *hmm*
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I've got some figures on a mythbackend system that I will probably port to linuxmce on the next mce release.
http://mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/User:Blackoper (http://mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/User:Blackoper)
I have a p3 kill-a-watt if you want any other power figures on any of my other motherboards/hardware
I got my backend down to 41 watts total power usage with the system 2.5" drive before adding pci and pci-e cards and hard drives
I use hdparm to spindown my drives and have no problem doing so. I give it two hours before they spin down to keep the bearings from being worn needlessly. I leave two drives active that are what myth records to. For some reason they won't spin down even if you want them to.
this is the section I put together on how to spin down hard drives for myth. Not sure if it will work for linuxmce yet though as I haven't tried it
http://mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/RAID#Spinning_down_hard_drives (http://mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/RAID#Spinning_down_hard_drives)
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You can't spin down disks in LMCE as it stands as every few minutes a load of scripts get fired off to snoop around the system, e.g. UpdateMedia etc.
If you set the hard drives to spin down (even using laptop_mode to cache writes) you will find they spin up again really quickly. This constant spin up/down is very damaging as a HD has a finite number of spin ups.
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You can't spin down disks in LMCE as it stands as every few minutes a load of scripts get fired off to snoop around the system, e.g. UpdateMedia etc.
If you set the hard drives to spin down (even using laptop_mode to cache writes) you will find they spin up again really quickly. This constant spin up/down is very damaging as a HD has a finite number of spin ups.
Hi,
it would be probably nice if we can separate whole system storage into separate areas. One being system, constantly working and the other with media that can be spinned down at least when no users are present and through the night... It would be first step.
UpdateMedia Daemon could also have an option to run it every now and then, not all the time or maybe watch just certain directories ...
Regards,
Bulek.
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well since it doesn't do spindowns, then with all the drives I have, it is cheaper for me to use a separate box running linuxmce and continue to use the backend I have... I save well over a hundred watts of power with all my drives spun down. I can get a working linuxmce box up and using around 40 watts or so.
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Hey Guys,
This topic is still hot with me.
I finally setup a dedicated Torrent system that shares/streams my media around the home network.
I used an Intel D201GLY ($69) http://www.intel.com/products/motherboard/D201GLY/index.htm (http://www.intel.com/products/motherboard/D201GLY/index.htm).
I bought a PW-200-M w/P4-ATX ($50) power supply and am using the system with just1 HD populated.
I haven't measured the power usage but it's probably in the 25-40 range during use.
I used to have a RAID system but it was way too much of a pig for me to keep it on, It cost a fortune...5 disks(with spinsdown), system running 24/7, I couldn't walk in my office without sweating. Not a viable solution for me.
I'm happy so far with the little system, but now I want to make a director from the same HW setup or similar. more info to follow...
Anyone else have a cheap Mobo and low power like the D201GLY as their director???
Thx
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I haven't measured the power usage but it's probably in the 25-40 range during use.
I'd love to see an actual measurement.
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Repeat of post this is a better place
Power supplies make a big difference
http://www.80plus.org/
To further reduce power.
I am also playing with
http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/powertop/
and others are now hibernating their MD's
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I have been looking for a good power saving solution for my core and I have been leaning towards the Intel e2180. It looks like a few other people have successfuly used them in there cores. I am also planning on using RAID 1 with only two 1TB drives to save a bit more power if I can’t spin the drives down when the core is idle. Has anyone had issues or success with the e2180 and if so what mobo are you using and how many capture cards (i.e. video encode streams) do you have running at one time?
A first step any development team should take when it comes to power consumption is to minimize CPU and disk usage on polling tasks and use hardware to signal events asynchronously. For example, there is no reason why an update task has to run every few mins (or hours even) when we know that most updates are only available once every few days, weeks or months. Why should a task look every so often for updates or even scan the hard drive? Lets learn from systems like TiVo that simply look once a day at 3am when there should be little activity. Then, once the update process completes the disks should return to the state that they where in prior to the update. If all non user tasks where synchronized to run at a specified time when there is low user load and then return to a sleep state we would not have to worry about drives spinning up when there is no needed user or system load.
Also, I completely agree that LMCE should disconnect its media store from its system store to allow for media drives to spin down. However, it seams that there is a simple solution to this problem, use some form of NAS or another low power system to supply data storage and place that system in sleep mode when not in use (assuming that LMCE does not poll the NAS drives). Also has anyone looked into using 2.5 laptop drives in there core instead of the 3.5 inch high speed (10k rpm) power hogs? I know a lot of enterprise server solutions (specify HP servers) are doing that now, not only for power savings but also for space savings; you can fit a lot more 2.5 inch drives in a thin rack mounted server.
As an intermediate solution would it be possible to run the poling tasks and things like the myth scheduler on an external low power system (e.g. Via’s EPIA systems) and simply bring the core out of a standby or hibernate via wake on LAN (or hardwired power up signal) when specific events occur such as a scheduled recording is coming up or based on a household calendar or when a MD comes online?
Note: I have not yet used LMCE (but I will be soon) thus, I have made some assumptions based on what I have read on the Wiki and in the forums in the last few weeks. That is, I have no first hand experience so please feel free to correct me as needed ;D
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These big drives come with really fast transfer speed, that LMCE doesn't really use. 750GB drives push something like 375MBps, though the SATA interface gives maybe 300MBps tops, probably more like 250MBps. But the highest bandwidth, video, plays at something like <1.5MBps. If those drives could burst transfer when content is requested from them, they'd have a lot of time to spin down between requests. A whole DVD is only max 4.7GB, so a $65 16GB USB Flash drive could cache 3.4 entire DVDs (probably more than 4 movies). But USB does max 60MBps, though multiple parallel USB (on motherboards supporting truly parallel USB, with full bandwidth for each of maybe 4 USB ports) would argue for 4 $15 GB drives to get 240MBps. Since the movies take hours to play, that could be something like 20-30 seconds bursting the requested movie to Flash, for each hour or two pulling them from the Flash. Those Flash drives can probably also cache the entire LMCE from the disk in just 8-10GB of the 16GB cache. The drives might spend something like 90% of the time spun down, even during heavy use, except when skipping through the actual content of a lot of different titles.
How to structure the storage to put a bank of USB Flash drives in the data path as cache for the hard drives, and set the drives to spin down as part of this power saving profile?
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one note about saving power.. I'd also look at using the hdhomerun devices instead of HD capture cards. The power usage is lower and it frees up the pci slots.. not to mention the joy of not having to mess with firmware updates/os upgrade issues
Supposedly that intel 2180 uses less power than the be amd series chips or close to it. I've got a 2180 and with just the mobo and an efficient power supply greater than 85% effiency my power usage was 39 watts. Once you add in pci cards it jumps by about 8 watts per card. Under heavy load the power usage jumps about 15 watts give or take