Topic: Did I just sabotage my going green effort?

[JohnG]

I'm downsizing a home SME server from an old power hog server to a Sempron with AMD's "cool and quiet" technology, a Western Digital "intellipower" hard drive and an "80 plus" power supply. Power consumption has gone down from 190 watts to 35 watts. I then installed a bunch of contribs including awstats and sme7admin. Since these contribs do regular status checks, and power is conserved when the system is idle, I was wondering if I might be negating some of the power benefits. These contribs are great but I'd like to know if they come at a cost. Thanks for any thoughts.

[christian]

probably not as the CPU should not be significantly affected and I don't think the Hard drives ever really have a chance to spin down regardless.

BTW, is the graphics built into the Mother Board or did you find a power efficient graphics card? It is disturbing to see how power hungry even the basic graphics cards are.

How did you measure your power utilization? You should be able to measure the before and after effect using a device such as a kill-a-watt meter which measures cumulative consumption.

[CharlieBrady]

I then installed a bunch of contribs including awstats and sme7admin. Since these contribs do regular status checks, and power is conserved when the system is idle, I was wondering if I might be negating some of the power benefits. These contribs are great but I'd like to know if they come at a cost.

Well of course they do. The question is "how much?".

If you want to monitor system resource usage and you worry about processor load, I would look at collectd rather than awstats.

[JohnG]

probably not as the CPU should not be significantly affected and I don't think the Hard drives ever really have a chance to spin down regardless.

BTW, is the graphics built into the Mother Board or did you find a power efficient graphics card? It is disturbing to see how power hungry even the basic graphics cards are.

How did you measure your power utilization? You should be able to measure the before and after effect using a device such as a kill-a-watt meter which measures cumulative consumption.

Yeah I'm using the onboard graphics adapter. Some GPUs make nice space heaters. 

I measured using a kill-a-watt and that's what I'm currently doing for the next week. Then I'll remove awstats and sme7admin and see if there's any difference.

Well of course they do. The question is "how much?".

If you want to monitor system resource usage and you worry about processor load, I would look at collectd rather than awstats.

I'll looking into collectd, thanks. It's not really the processor load I'm worried about, it's the periodic data logging that comes with system monitoring in general. Built in to the motherboard/hard drive/power is supposed to be logic to recognize idle periods and lessen power according, but I'm thinking these contribs there may leave little or no idle time.

I decided to keep track of power usage over the next few weeks and see if I see any difference, with or without.

[judgej]

In the sme7admin admin panel, disable the 'du' feature as that hogs the processor much of the time continuously checking the usage of all folders on the hard drive. There is little else in those contribs that will increase the background power.

-- Jason

[qvindesland]

Hola 

Did you try to update the bios on your machine?

Per