Reduce power consumption

[johnblanker]

Performance with what I wonder? All I'm doing is setting up network shares with my freeNAS. I have no other processes running, no jail, no parity. (I'm the guy you were helping from the other thread ;)).
I'm not doing any trans-coding either. If the file transfer speed would be affected then that would matter.

My requirements are pretty basic. I just want to setup shares of my media using the lowest possible power consumption. I use the wdtv live smp and stream straight BD rips that require no transcoding.

 

[johnblanker]

might need to flash my bios though. I don't think I have ever done that without the OS installed.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Oh hey, yeah, you're that guy.

Since you're using a Realtek NIC which leans on the processor for some things, you might actually see a drop in throughput. But given your use case (single media stream) I'm sure it will be fine. Heck, an Atom can push 50-60MB/s just fine.

 

[johnblanker]

Well, I picked up the sempron anyway. Got the new 80+ bronze PSU, installed it! And saw no difference in power consumption whatsoever. That was a waste of a $24 PSU! Oh well. I thought for sure I would see a difference. That old Antec PSU was purchased from circuit city just when sata connections were getting popular. I bought a dvd burner (when they were affordable) for like $100 and didn't have sata ports on my PSU. The Antec only has 2 sata ports too. Were are talking around year 2002 maybe?

 

[erodz1892]

Hello, sorry to jump here being reading on how to save some Watts I currently upgraded my machine and the power consumption wasn't was I was expecting. Currently considering removing the GPU but not sure if that's going to have a big effect on it. Or maybe replacing it with a more efficient one
Previous specs
AMD A8 7600(45W), 16GB Ram , mini ITX form factor, 2RED drives(data), 1SSD (jails) 1 120mm fan. pulling 45W idle

working with AMD prove to be a bit of a pain trying to figure Temps and Freq the sensors aren't really tuned or optimized freq scaling was another problem with AMD cool and quiet interfering with pwerD and many more

Current Spec Xeon L5640(60W) ASUS P6X58D motherboard,24GB ddr3,Sapphire Technology Radeon HD 5450 Low Profile, 2Red Drives,1 Green drive, 1SSD. . 4 120mm fans. Pulling 110W idle
I just almost triplicated the power consumption by switching to this parts I am impressed with the performance of the new machine but really disappointed with the power consumption electricity here is at .0933 Kw not sure if I actually won on this deal of shot myself in the foot. Opinions are welcome


.

 

[cyberjock]

I wouldn't be surprised if:

1. Your motherboard doesn't use power management functions that FreeBSD uses since it's not really "server-grade".
2. That video card is a killer for power usage.. ditch it. Ideally if you had gone with "server-grade" you'd probably have a built-in video card that would use like 2w and you'd never have to care about it again.

My X9SCM-F with 32GB of RAM and server-grade stuff ran 35w idle with no hard drives... so I'd guess that 50w would have been overstating what it would have been with 3 hard drives attached compared to your setup. :/

 

[jgreco]

Nehalem, Westmere, really anything before Sandy Bridge, not that great on the power consumption end of things. Expect your "60W" CPU to be using a lot of that.

Good god get rid of the GPU. That's another 10-20 watts of worthless.

Make sure your fans aren't running at full speed. That could burn lots of watts, depending on the fans.

 

[joeschmuck]

I can only see a few things you can do to reduce your power consumption...

1) Once your system is fully configured and boots reliably, power it off, remove the video card, power it back on. If it boots up fine then you have reduced the video card power consumption.
2) Underclock your CPU, however generally you will not drop much power consumption but a few watts and if you underclock too far your system will become unstable. If you do this then you must run stability tests like MemTest and Prime95 or similar. I am not a fan of underclocking for power consumption reasons, as I said you don't save much.

 

[erodz1892]

Many thanks ! following directions seems I am heading the right way, got it to work following these as well passing the error on the bios http://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/no-video-card.3895/ from an idle at 110W went down to 98W by removing the GPU and disabling one 120mm fan that's all the drives running have them on spin down to 20 mins ill have to wait to see those results. I do have another Xeon CPU the L5630 this is the same CPU L5640 except runs at a slower freq and lacks 2 cpu cores of a max TDP of 40W I do a lot of trans coding so I would prefer to keep the one I am using and I am skeptical of idle usage of both CPUs should be really close.(update) disk sleeping went further down to 92W !! at this pace is going to cost $7.70 a month way better than before. Doesnt seem so bad after all is fine if I went from 45W to 92W but gained a better platform AMD was really a pain to deal with. Many Thanks!

 

[joeschmuck]

Two cores should be enough for FreeNAS (yes, the other chip is 4 cores). I could be wrong but I don't believe there are many, if any, multi-threaded capabilities with this application.

 

[jgreco]

He was talking about transcoding...

 

[joeschmuck]

He was talking about transcoding...

I understood that. But the jail is only a single thread, right?

Please correct me but just about everything in FreeNAS is single threaded. Having 2 cores is fine for all that FreeNAS currently has to offer. If he removes one of his CPUs, he's still got 4 cores. Also, for the system being run, 16GB RAM should be plenty and would also drop power consumption.

Seriously, if I mis-stated something I would like someone to correct me.

 

[jgreco]

But the jail is only a single thread, right?

Tooooootally wrong.

Please correct me but just about everything in FreeNAS is single threaded.

There's a lot of stuff that happens to be single threaded but that is mostly just due to history.

A UNIX system schedules processes onto available CPU resources. A process can be single or multithreaded. Some legacy software like Samba is singlethreaded because it comes from the days of single CPU's and making properly threaded software is exceedingly difficult even when starting from scratch; going back and making something really insanely complex like Samba threaded is a nightmare. That's why all the fu about Samba being singlethreaded.

But a jail isn't a process. It is merely a division to keep resources within the jail from seeing outside the jail. The jail consists of at LEAST one process, and could be many, and those processes (each of which can run on a separate CPU if available) can also be multithreaded. Plex is, IIRC, both multithreaded and has several supporting processes. You could absolutely have a jail on a machine with 128 cores eating 128 of those cores. ;-)

 

[erodz1892]

I hold the jails on a SSD so the HDDs got to sleep, I was going to downgrade the CPU to the L5630 the problem is that this machine spends quiet some time at idle and there aren't much information out there for these cpus. The idle power for these (L5630vsL5640)should be close even thought one has 20W higher TDP I believe and well freenas does recognize 12 cores of the L5640 Hyper Threading enabled I am sure I will be ok with the L5630 but if I can have more horsepower for the same wattage then I rather keep the current L5640 sometimes I transcode 3 movies at the same time for different clients. I could remove 8GB of RAM to save more power but thats the main reason that I choose this motherboard because ZFS is just a ram guzzler. I unplugged another far dropping to 90W idle so I just save 20W so far.

 

[pschatz100]

Power use really depends on what you do. If your machine spends a lot of time at idle, it is unlikely that you will see any measurable difference in your electric bill just by changing the CPU for a slightly more efficient one or removing sticks of RAM.

 

[cyberjock]

If I'm not mistaken a stick of RAM typically uses only 2w. :/

As a comparison we admonish the FB-DIMMs of yesteryears and they were "only" 8-10w per stick. You aren't saving much and if you are so paranoid about 2-3 watts you probably need to see a mental specialist. ;)