4 ms·

I love FreeBSD and was planning on switching some servers from Linux but found that it consumed about 25% more power than my Linux boxes (even after extensive p

by danford 12y ago

I love FreeBSD and was planning on switching some servers from Linux but found that it consumed about 25% more power than my Linux boxes (even after extensive power management tweaks) and in the end didn't have much advantage. It's not hard to install freeBSD in a VM, set up ssh, run it headless, and ssh in. I suggest you give it a go. It's a great learning experience.

networked 12y ago
>I love FreeBSD and was planning on switching some servers from Linux but found that it consumed about 25% more power than my Linux boxes Wow, I wouldn't have thought there would be such a dramatic difference in power consumption on anything but portable hardware. Did you try to measure the CPU and I/O usage on your servers and compare them between Linux and FreeBSD? I wonder if FreeBSD's greater power draw was due to its ACPI implementation or if the average system load was also higher (ZFS?).
- danford 12y ago
  I wasn't using zfs at the time and I didn't do much comparison with CPU and IO, I used a wattage meter. I followed the FreeBSD guide (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/acpi-overview.html http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ac...) and tried just about everything. My Linux box was running at about 9watts (idle) and freeBSD started out at around 18, but I got it down to about 12watts after making a lot of optimizations. I think most of the difference is because FreeBSD is using older more stable software, and the Ubuntu server was running some of the latest software.
  - takeda 12y ago
    Do you remember which FreeBSD version and which Linux kernel version was it? Linux had tickless kernel + CPU scaling for a while. FreeBSD is lagging in this aspect.
    - profquail 12y ago
      The FreeBSD kernel is tickless as of FreeBSD 10: http://www.freebsdnews.net/2013/09/20/freebsd-10s-new-technologies-and-features/ http://www.freebsdnews.net/2013/09/20/freebsd-10s-new-techno...
      - takeda 12y ago
        Yes, exactly, it only has it for couple of months, that's why I asked about version.
      - takeda 12y ago
        Yes, exactly, it only has it for couple of months, that's why I asked about version.
      - takeda 12y ago
        Yes, exactly, it only has it for couple of months, that's why I asked about version.
mfb 12y ago
I'd be interested to see some benchmarks comparing Linux and FreeBSD power usage. Personally I've been impressed w/ power management on FreeBSD 10 using recent hardware - once I enabled powerd and set the powerd_flags - but I haven't installed Linux on the same hardware.

by danford 12y ago

networked 12y ago

>I love FreeBSD and was planning on switching some servers from Linux but found that it consumed about 25% more power than my Linux boxes Wow, I wouldn't have thought there would be such a dramatic difference in power consumption on anything but portable hardware. Did you try to measure the CPU and I/O usage on your servers and compare them between Linux and FreeBSD? I wonder if FreeBSD's greater power draw was due to its ACPI implementation or if the average system load was also higher (ZFS?).

danford 12y ago
I wasn't using zfs at the time and I didn't do much comparison with CPU and IO, I used a wattage meter. I followed the FreeBSD guide (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/acpi-overview.html http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ac...) and tried just about everything. My Linux box was running at about 9watts (idle) and freeBSD started out at around 18, but I got it down to about 12watts after making a lot of optimizations. I think most of the difference is because FreeBSD is using older more stable software, and the Ubuntu server was running some of the latest software.
- takeda 12y ago
  Do you remember which FreeBSD version and which Linux kernel version was it? Linux had tickless kernel + CPU scaling for a while. FreeBSD is lagging in this aspect.
  - profquail 12y ago
    The FreeBSD kernel is tickless as of FreeBSD 10: http://www.freebsdnews.net/2013/09/20/freebsd-10s-new-technologies-and-features/ http://www.freebsdnews.net/2013/09/20/freebsd-10s-new-techno...
    - takeda 12y ago
      Yes, exactly, it only has it for couple of months, that's why I asked about version.
    - takeda 12y ago
      Yes, exactly, it only has it for couple of months, that's why I asked about version.
    - takeda 12y ago
      Yes, exactly, it only has it for couple of months, that's why I asked about version.

mfb 12y ago

I'd be interested to see some benchmarks comparing Linux and FreeBSD power usage. Personally I've been impressed w/ power management on FreeBSD 10 using recent hardware - once I enabled powerd and set the powerd_flags - but I haven't installed Linux on the same hardware.