January 17, 201610 yr Dear all, finally, I want to switch to unRaid. Love the concept/design of the product. I installed the trial version on a USB stick and booted unRaid. Server is a Dell T20 (Xeon, 24GB ECC RAM) without any HDDs/SSDs connected. Only the USB drive with unRaid. The power consumption is 18,5 watts. With the same BIOS setup Windows 10 Pro x64 (on SSD, no USB drive), with full workstation configuration, measures at 11,5 watts after login. The unRaid dashboard shows no CPU utilization (less than 5%), but the CPU frequency hovers around 3000MHz on each core. Sometimes drops to 1700MHz, but then again to the 3000Mhz range. What is the problem? Best regards, Henrx
January 17, 201610 yr Dear all, finally, I want to switch to unRaid. Love the concept/design of the product. I installed the trial version on a USB stick and booted unRaid. Server is a Dell T20 (Xeon, 24GB ECC RAM) without any HDDs/SSDs connected. Only the USB drive with unRaid. The power consumption is 18,5 watts. With the same BIOS setup Windows 10 Pro x64 (on SSD, no USB drive), with full workstation configuration, measures at 11,5 watts after login. The unRaid dashboard shows no CPU utilization (less than 5%), but the CPU frequency hovers around 3000MHz on each core. Sometimes drops to 1700MHz, but then again to the 3000Mhz range. What is the problem? Best regards, Henrx Sounds like frequency governor. What model Xeon you have?
January 17, 201610 yr Author Sounds like frequency governor. What model Xeon you have? It's an intel xeon 1225v3.
January 17, 201610 yr Stop using the UI to monitor while testing and also try adding the following to the syslinux.cfg configuration file: intel_pstate=disable This will use the older intel state device, which seems to not throttle up to maximum cpu as quickly as the intel pstate does. Here is my full syslinux.cfg file for reference. # cat /boot/syslinux/syslinux.cfg default /syslinux/menu.c32 menu title Lime Technology prompt 0 timeout 50 label unRAID OS menu default kernel /bzimage append intel_pstate=disable initrd=/bzroot label unRAID OS Safe Mode (no plugins) kernel /bzimage append intel_pstate=disable initrd=/bzroot unraidsafemode label Memtest86+ kernel /memtest Then to see CPU speed use something less taxing as the UI, such as the following: # cat /proc/cpuinfo | egrep -i mhz cpu MHz : 1600.000 cpu MHz : 1600.000 cpu MHz : 1600.000 cpu MHz : 1600.000 cpu MHz : 1600.000 cpu MHz : 1600.000 cpu MHz : 1600.000 cpu MHz : 1600.000
January 17, 201610 yr You can add the intel_pstate=disable setting to the syslinux configuration (see attachment) Goto Main -> Boot device -> Flash -> Syslinux configuration. Edit and apply the setting. You need to reboot the system to make the setting active. Ps. BRiT beats me..
January 22, 201610 yr Author Thanks for the help, but my original problem still exists. The pstate command helps to lower the CPU MHz to 800 MHz on 2 sometimes 3 cores. One core still hovers around 3000 MHz and 1 jumps from 800 to 1700 MHz. Power consumption measured at around 19 watts (not in dashboard, looked up the cpu MHz via putty). Since the unraid server is planned for home use and energy cost is high here, I really want to lower the idle power consumption (~8 watts difference, that's nearly 2 NAS HDDs idling). Best regards, Henrx
January 22, 201610 yr Author Is this maybe a Trial "feature"? Log shows (loop of the following): an 22 18:35:32 Tower emhttp: shcmd (184): rmmod md-mod |& logger Jan 22 18:35:32 Tower kernel: md: unRAID driver removed Jan 22 18:35:32 Tower emhttp: shcmd (185): modprobe md-mod super=/boot/config/super.dat slots=3 |& logger Jan 22 18:35:32 Tower kernel: md: unRAID driver 2.5.3 installed Jan 22 18:35:32 Tower kernel: read_file: error 2 opening /boot/config/super.dat Jan 22 18:35:32 Tower kernel: md: could not read superblock from /boot/config/super.dat Jan 22 18:35:32 Tower kernel: md: initializing superblock Jan 22 18:35:32 Tower emhttp: Trial key detected, GUID: yxz FILE: /boot/config/Trial.key Jan 22 18:35:32 Tower emhttp: Device inventory: Jan 22 18:35:32 Tower emhttp: shcmd (186): udevadm settle Jan 22 18:35:32 Tower emhttp: array slots: 3 Jan 22 18:35:32 Tower emhttp: cache slots: 1 Jan 22 18:35:32 Tower emhttp: import 3 cache device: no device Jan 22 18:35:32 Tower emhttp: import flash device: sda Jan 22 18:35:32 Tower kernel: mdcmd (1): import 0 0,0 Jan 22 18:35:32 Tower kernel: mdcmd (2): import 1 0,0 Jan 22 18:35:32 Tower kernel: mdcmd (3): import 2 0,0
January 22, 201610 yr Community Expert Have you started the array yet? Until you do so you will continually get entries in the syslog of the sort you show. Once the array is started they should stop happening.
January 23, 201610 yr Author Started an array (1 HDD and 1 SSD). Still 2 cores with elevated MHz, after hours of not using the server. No log information for ours. I'll try other systems, must know if this is an issue with my hardware or settings.
January 23, 201610 yr Community Expert Started an array (1 HDD and 1 SSD). Still 2 cores with elevated MHz, after hours of not using the server. No log information for ours. I'll try other systems, must know if this is an issue with my hardware or settings. How are you checking the CPU usage? Ideally it should not be via the GUI as that can stop the cores throttling down. Having said that it may just be a function of the way that the Linux kernel handles throttling for your particular processor.
January 23, 201610 yr To watch cpu/core frequency more accurately, telnet/SSH to server and use: watch -n.1 'cat /proc/cpuinfo|grep MHz' Post the results of these commands from telnet/SSH: cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_available_governors cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor
January 25, 201610 yr Author So... root@Tower:~# cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_available_governors conservative userspace powersave ondemand performance conservative userspace powersave ondemand performance conservative userspace powersave ondemand performance conservative userspace powersave ondemand performance root@Tower:~# And... root@Tower:~# cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor ondemand ondemand ondemand ondemand root@Tower:~# The "watch" is going "crazy". Like I already wrote, 2 cores in the ~800 MHz, 1 core ~1100-1800 MHz and the last 1 at ~ 2800-3200 MHz (always random).
January 26, 201610 yr Have you started the array and monitored the power usage? The unRAID polls constantly until the array is started so it may cause a core or two to show higher usage than what would be considered idle. If you don't care about a couple percentage of snappiness you can change the governor to conservative. The difference between ondemand and conservative is ondemand will jump up to full clock quicker and be slower to drop back down while conservative favors lower clocks with a slower rise to full speed. Both can be manually tweaked to get a decent response. Try changing to conservative and see how you like, use the watch command posted earlier to see the result: echo conservative > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor echo conservative > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/cpufreq/scaling_governor echo conservative > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu2/cpufreq/scaling_governor echo conservative > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu3/cpufreq/scaling_governor A reboot will revert the governor back to normal. You can add the above lines to the go file to have it persist. The other option is to keep ondemand and just adjust the thresholds so it acts more conservative.
January 27, 201610 yr Author Thank you unevent, it helped to lower the cpu frequency. The scaling governor now reports "conservative". Currently I can't measure the power usage (batterie died; I measure it at the weekend.)
January 28, 201610 yr A reboot will revert the governor back to normal. You can add the above lines to the go file to have it persist. The other option is to keep ondemand and just adjust the thresholds so it acts more conservative. Thanks for all the information you've posted so far, I happened to stumble across this while I've been wondering the same thing for weeks. I can't find the file you're talking about to edit, though, to keep the settings on reboots.
January 28, 201610 yr A reboot will revert the governor back to normal. You can add the above lines to the go file to have it persist. The other option is to keep ondemand and just adjust the thresholds so it acts more conservative. Thanks for all the information you've posted so far, I happened to stumble across this while I've been wondering the same thing for weeks. I can't find the file you're talking about to edit, though, to keep the settings on reboots. /boot/config/go Its located on your flash drive.
January 28, 201610 yr /boot/config/go Its located on your flash drive. I appreciate it. I was really struggling with googling to find that.
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