In an effort to make the homelab more environmentally friendly, I have started to explore ways to conserve energy consumption. I always see a lot of considerations for choosing equipment that sips power, but other than avoiding enterprise power hogs and very old equipment, I don’t see a lot of advice in how to tame the server(s) you may already have.

So far I’ve looked at:

  • TLP: Adjusts CPU frequency scaling, PCI‑e ASPM, SATA link power‑management
  • Powertop: Used to profile power consumption and has a tune feature sudo powertop --auto-tune
  • cpufrequtils: Used to manage the CPU governor directly
  • logind.conf: Can be used to put the whole server to sleep when idle

Since I am the only user of my network, and since a lot of times the server sits unused until I want to engage maybe listening to my audio collection via Navidrome, or perhaps I’m working on some automation in n8n, et al, there’s no need to be at max power 24/7.

So besides just powering off and on the server, which would work but not be quite as elegant of a solution, are there other ways you have come across, read about, deployed on your own server?

ETA: Thanks for everyone’s input. I realize that the ideal scenario is to have more energy effecient equipment. Sometimes tho, this is not a ready made solution due to many constraints. The exercise was to try to squeeze out every last little power saving option I could, without obviously replacing equipment.

Many thanks.

  • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    3 days ago

    It starts with the hardware first. You started well with tuning your CPU/MEM frequency settings, but that matters less if you’re running giant PSUs (or redundant), more drives than you need, and a huge number of peripherals.

    Get a cheap outlet monitor to see what your power draw is and track it at the wall. I just got these cheap Emporia ones. I’m sure there’s more reputable ones out there.

    Don’t go crazy with your networking solution if you don’t need them. PoE switches draw tons of power even when idle, and a 24-port switch is a huge draw if you’re only using 3 of them.

    Consider getting a power efficient NAS box for backend storage, and low power Minipc for frontend serving instead of using a power hungry machine for all your network apps.

    You can dive deeper into any angle thing, but these are the basics.