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> power hungry server running 24/7

Nothing in this article supports this statement. It just says "high power consumption" without measuring, and declares victory without measuring the power saved. The fact is that power scaling has almost erased the difference between "suspended" and just "idle", to such an extent that there might not even be a meaningful difference, or any measurable difference.

My NUC 12 Pro is drawing, at the wall, 2.7W, as best as I can measure. The SoC reports drawing below 200mW. This server is on. The way to get low power states on these is to just make sure your Linux is up to the task and your BIOS works correctly, which is one of the reasons to choose a NUC. The first-party firmware works!

Another important thing for low-power server operation is to either use wifi, or make sure your ethernet is configured correctly for low-power operation. Unless you fix it, gigabit ethernet by default will propagate the link state all the way down to a high power state on the CPU. The NIC will say that it has tight latency requirements because the link is active, and it will configure the PCIe bus to avoid PCI link power management, and it will tell the CPU that it can't go below PC6. To avoid this you have to configure your NIC to ignore link latency requirements. Just unplugging the ethernet is the easier path, and it's faster than gigabit these days.



NOte that the NUCs with power saving and wifi have a serious problem: latency. By default in the various Linux OSen I use, wifi power management is enabled. Often times, repeated pings will jump from 5ms to 100+ms (with a very high variance) and network bandwidth will be extremely poor. Even ssh on a LAN can be unusable!


Sure, but it's a miracle that it can do this at all. It's entering and exiting a sleep state that is very nearly off, in between pings.


My first thought too. Reports can show the power usage for each process. So reduce the power-hungry processes. Or schedule them for lower cost times of day.




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