5 ms·
>Why isn't this the default (or at least a configuration option)? Because 1) you still need a second machine to wait for incoming requests, 2) in a server ther
by deadbeeves 4y ago
>Why isn't this the default (or at least a configuration option)?
Because 1) you still need a second machine to wait for incoming requests, 2) in a server there's no general way to check if the server is serving requests or not. Plex happened to provide an API that specifically does what you needed, but you had to resort to a bit of a hack for Time Machine. This is unlike a desktop context, where you can check if the user has moved the mouse or pressed a key in the last N minutes. And 3) because the delay of waiting for the server to wake back up is undesirable.
>Seriously, there is soooo much potential to save energy in IT.
I don't think so. For VPS instances it doesn't matter, and for internal servers it's almost certainly more efficient to virtualize a bunch of services onto a single box, if there's multiple servers idle most of the time.
- Dalewyn 4y agoIt's also worth mentioning that, by his own admission, OP only managed to save less than 2 euro cents per day (60 / 3360). Maybe he has different ideas, and that's perfectly fine, but personally I value reliability and uptime far more than 2 cents. EDIT: I failed at math. See below comments. :V
- sokoloff 4y agoAbout 41 euro cents per day->57€/140 3360 is the number of hours in 140 days.
- Dalewyn 4y agoYou are, in fact, correct. I have no idea why I converted 140 days into hours... Still, my point remains unchanged: I, at least, value reliability and uptime more than ~43 euro cents.
- judge2020 4y agoAnd doing this is not going to largely affect the energy usage of the EU - at least, in comparison to, say, Dell putting Platinum rated PSUs in their workstations and AMD making good server chips that are twice as efficient at the same performance point as Intel's chips.
- runnerup 4y agoOr the energy usage of Germany’s chemicals industry…
- themitigating 4y agoOr the cost of running water pumps for public fountains
- bombolo 4y agoThe romans had water fountains and no pumps. Perhaps you underestimate gravity.
- themitigating 4y agoDid I mention the Romans. I was talking about modern fountains some of which have pumps
- EricE 4y agoItaly is pretty mountain rich - central Europe though?!?
- bboygravity 4y agoOr the energy useage of 1 metal smelter.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago43 cents / day is >150 a year, that's not to be sniffed at. Actually, at 150 / year you can rent a VPS (or two!) as well, always-on etc, which... kinda shows how skewed consumer price for electricity is.
- londons_explore 4y agoyour VPS will have a shared CPU with hundreds of other customers... So will probably be using far less power (for you) than your home server. In Europe at least, most industrial users were paying more for electricity than residential users over the winter (gas shortage). Governments subsidized residential users more than most businesses.
- justsomehnguy 4y agoAnd you can have most of it with a banal sleeping/waking up by the schedule. Regular Joe sleeps at night and works at day. EDIT: btw, this solves "if Time Machine starts a backup" completely.
- jethro_tell 4y agoI have a backup box that wakes and does it's thing every night then shuts itself down when it's done. I have a Plex box that turns on after work.
- SamuelAdams 4y agoOk, the implementation wasn’t very fantastic cost wise. However I still think this could be a big area of improvement. How can we reduce energy usage of servers? There’s a lot of work with ARM lately, I’m curious if that could be used in server workloads like this.
- deadbeeves 4y agoThe most effective way is to be able to dynamically distribute load across a large array of servers, turning some off at times of lower load. Anyone who runs a large datacenter probably already does this or something equivalent, either to save money or to service more customers with the same amount of hardware. It's more effective to optimize the hardware architecture, but it's worth noting that improvements in efficiency usually don't translate to reductions in power consumption. Instead, it causes induced demand and usage increases to fill available capacity.
- judge2020 4y ago> Anyone who runs a large datacenter probably already does this or something equivalent, either to save money or to service more customers with the same amount of hardware. Possibly, but few cloud providers actually do live migration[0] since it's risky to pause a VM for typically less than 1 second, but up to 5 seconds. 0: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/live-migration-process#how_does_the_live_migration_process_work https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/live-migrati...
- deadbeeves 4y agoI was actually thinking about elastic AWS instances when I wrote that. IIRC they're meant to be spun up and then shut down as a service's demand varies. VPS providers are already overprovisioned anyway, so they have less idle hardware to begin with.
- Gareth321 4y agoIsn't that really expensive? Far more expensive than just keeping a cluster running 24x7? I think the much bigger cost here is shelf space and the hardware, and so the retail price isn't impact much by the cost of power. For the record I like the concept and hope it becomes a lot cheaper over time.
- trialect 4y agoWhat? Synology DS413 and DS213+ does this automatically. What second machine?