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Topic: low energy dsl box, reduce energy consumption of a DSL box

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sixdiamants Offline

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Posts: 10
Joined: Mar. 2007

Posted: Aug. 13 2007,21:18

Gents,
the great minimalistic approach seen in DSL incited me to try and minimise energy consumption of my always-on ITX box.
For starters, I opted for a frugal install to a CF disk - hence no spinning disks.

Now I'm wondering if I can go any further.

Other paths I'm considering are:
Throttle the CPU - anyone recommend software/read-ups ?
Boot in text-only mode - I suppose that this reduces software cycles hence consumption, right ??
Wake-on-Lan - but I suppose that this is a tad difficult when the box runs only on a wifi-lan.

Any other ideas, suggestions for reducing my CO2 emissions ?!

Yours,

Bob "Green Punk" Janssen

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ce qui se conçoit bien s'énonce clairement

lucky13

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Posted: Aug. 13 2007,22:06

Quote

Boot in text-only mode - I suppose that this reduces software cycles hence consumption, right ??

I start runlevel 3. I don't think that saves much in terms of net CPU cycles if you're going to startx anyway. I'm also not convinced by the 90% or so of my recent DSL use entirely in console that there's much to be saved in terms of CPU cycles. Some console apps use more CPU cycles than X apps do, some X apps use more than console apps. There can be some serious differences in RAM use, but I think it's a wash CPU wise.

Quote

Any other ideas, suggestions for reducing my CO2 emissions ?

Breathing creates more CO2 than your computer ever will. I don't advise cutting back on that, though.

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tinker

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Posts: 33
Joined: May 2007

Posted: Aug. 14 2007,12:24

Quote (sixdiamants @ Aug. 13 2007,17:18)

Other paths I'm considering are:
Throttle the CPU - anyone recommend software/read-ups ?
Boot in text-only mode - I suppose that this reduces software cycles hence consumption, right ??
Wake-on-Lan - but I suppose that this is a tad difficult when the box runs only on a wifi-lan.

Throtle the CPU? Not sure what you mean by this, if it's idle, it's idle, if you need to compute, then you want it to be as powerful and fast as it can be. Depending on the system BIOS you might be able to lower the speed of the FSB but that might not give satisfactory results as the system would always run slower.

WOL requires both a lan card that is capable of outputting a signal and a motherboard that has the header for that to connect to. Delay between when a request is made over the lan and the wake up time might be a factor depending on how you intend to us it.

It seems like putting the system in standby when you aren't using it would use the least power and thus achieve the least CO2 emissions from the fossil fuel burned to create the electricity furnished to your house, which is what I assume you meant by that.

curaga

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Joined: Feb. 2007

Posted: Aug. 14 2007,13:48

You can throttle the cpu without any tools on any standard Linux system. Though running it throttled/on a lower power level (speedstep etc) reduces the heat and electricity used, it also reduces the speed..

If you're going for it, the stuff is in /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0
look at the contents of all files there. If "throttling" says your cpu can handle 7 states (it also lists how much each state throttles in percentage), then you can enable one of them by doing

Quote

echo -n "2" > /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/throttling

On my comp throttling level 2 means 25% less power..

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curaga

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Posts: 2163
Joined: Feb. 2007

Posted: Aug. 14 2007,13:50

You could also tweak the screensaver (screen blacking) settings to happen faster, and try Intel's new Powertop to see which process uses the most cpu power..

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There's no such thing as life. Those mean little jocks invented it ;)
-
Windows is not a virus. A virus does something!

9 replies since Aug. 13 2007,21:18

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