Reduce power consumption with powertop


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6 hours ago, Swarles said:

have good low-watt efficiency; the SilverStone Nightjar 450W (SST-NJ450-SXL).

Not even close to the RMX550x (2021) as the real magic happens under 25W which is visible on the (very small) size of the bottom left spot.

 

I tried the Supermicro PWS-341P-1H 340W Platinum as of my research it is the smallest platinum power supply available, but even this is extremely bad on low power:

https://gutt.it/seasonic-titanium-netzteil-bei-niedriglast-keine-option/

 

But it seems all recent Corsair Power Supplies have the same low power efficient feature:

https://www.tweakpc.de/hardware/tests/netzteile/corsair_rmx_shift_rm750x_rm850x_rm1000x/s02.php

Screenshot_20230605_200555.thumb.png.19cd6ff3eb60846d920a862b2bfaf0db.png

 

But: They start at 750W. Which can't be as efficient as 550W (or even smaller ones). Sadly there is still no update regarding the SF-lineup. Having an SFX power supply with 450W and this efficiency would be a dream.

 

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On 6/5/2023 at 8:09 PM, mgutt said:

Not even close to the RMX550x (2021) as the real magic happens under 25W which is visible on the (very small) size of the bottom left spot.

 

I tried the Supermicro PWS-341P-1H 340W Platinum as of my research it is the smallest platinum power supply available, but even this is extremely bad on low power:

https://gutt.it/seasonic-titanium-netzteil-bei-niedriglast-keine-option/

 

But it seems all recent Corsair Power Supplies have the same low power efficient feature:

https://www.tweakpc.de/hardware/tests/netzteile/corsair_rmx_shift_rm750x_rm850x_rm1000x/s02.php

Screenshot_20230605_200555.thumb.png.19cd6ff3eb60846d920a862b2bfaf0db.png

 

But: They start at 750W. Which can't be as efficient as 550W (or even smaller ones). Sadly there is still no update regarding the SF-lineup. Having an SFX power supply with 450W and this efficiency would be a dream.

 

Which PSU would you recommend buying today(with a midrange price)? The 2021 rm550x is unobtainable, only rm750x seems to be available.

 

Having a 141w system at full load, where CPU is drawing ~95w. Belive picopsu(160w) will not be able to handle this since it's speced for 96W for 12v.

Edited by etnicor
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On 6/8/2023 at 6:52 AM, etnicor said:

Which PSU would you recommend buying today(with a midrange price)? The 2021 rm550x is unobtainable, only rm750x seems to be available.

 

Having a 141w system at full load, where CPU is drawing ~95w. Belive picopsu(160w) will not be able to handle this since it's speced for 96W for 12v.

I have the Seasonic PRIME TX-650 (80+ Titanium) installed in my unraid-server. I'm pretty sure, it's more efficient than the 2021 rm550x in the usual power range of low power unraid sytems (20-30W). In higher load scenarios, the TX-650 blows the rm550x out of the water.

 

Source: https://www.tweakpc.de/hardware/tests/netzteile/seasonic_prime_titanium/s03.php

 

image.png.8665fb6d7a9dc43e98926d6aab6fd1a3.png

Edited by madejackson
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6 minutes ago, Stubbs said:

Will all ATX3.0 Power Supplies be more efficient

No. All ATX12VO will, but still it's non standardized. I think Corsair already uses ATX12VO technology in their power supplies, but they aren't mentioning it anywhere.

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Thought Id post recent PSU findings.

Enhance PSU blew up that came with NAS case. Ran system at around 100-120w on the UPS. New replacement is a 80 gold with quiet fan but same brand Enchance psu.

System now runs at 78w on the UPS!

 

Definitely worth checking you have the most efficient PSU & also it is not too overcapacity of your system i.e 600w for a 150w system load.

Edited by dopeytree
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Hey, 
I am not sure if it is safe to use for me to use

powertop --quiet --auto-tune

because I have a SAS controller?

This is my current setup:
ASRock B450M Pro4
AMD Ryzen 5 2600
Corsair RM White Series™ RM850 (2021)
LSI® SAS 9211-8i (Chipset LSI SAS2008 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-2 [Falcon] (rev 03))

This is my

powertop

output, it looks diffrent than the one in the example, only 2 C states and Pkg(OS) instead of (HW):

 

p1.png

p2.png

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hi,

 

Are these errors a problem (unraid 6.11.5) ?

 

root@manitoba:~# powertop --auto-tune
powertop: /lib64/libncursesw.so.6: no version information available (required by powertop)
powertop: /lib64/libtinfo.so.6: no version information available (required by powertop)
modprobe cpufreq_stats failed
Loaded 0 prior measurements
Cannot load from file /var/cache/powertop/saved_parameters.powertop
File will be loaded after taking minimum number of measurement(s) with battery only
RAPL device for cpu 0
RAPL device for cpu 0
Devfreq not enabled
glob returned GLOB_ABORTED
Cannot load from file /var/cache/powertop/saved_parameters.powertop
File will be loaded after taking minimum number of measurement(s) with battery only
Leaving PowerTOP

 

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On 6/15/2023 at 5:56 PM, Interstellar said:

Anyone running 6.12 noticed increase in power usage?

 

Updated two weekends or so ago and now I’m 10W higher draw all of a sudden!

 

6.11 before upgrade - 32-34W measured at the wall

Updated to 6.12.1 - 50+W

Downgraded to 6.11 - 32-34W

 

It is like disks aren't spinning down when they say they are (I forgot to check physically if they were)... going to file a bug report.

 

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Hey guys,

hope you have some tipps, how i can get idle even lower.

Current setup:
- Asrock E3C236D2i
- Xeon E3-1275 V5
- 2x 16GB 2133 DDR4 Ram
- Corsair SF450 SFX
- 7x Noctua Case fan
- 1x CPU Noctua FAN
- Silverstone ASM1166 Controller, latest firmware
- 10x 7200 SATA drives (between 8TB to 20tb)
- 1x SSD Cache Samsung evo
- iGPU active


What I have done so far:
- Autotune on
- C-State on: already reaching highest level C7
- Enable ASPM
- disable second 2.5GB network card
- disable Turbo mode
- CPU Governor: Powersaving mode on

Current Idle:
- 23-27 Watt
- no docker container active
- no VMs active
- unplug 6 HHD fans only drop the power about 1 watt, so no real impact, but HDDs will stay cooler

 

powertop.thumb.png.1dae57181d295eb488bb504a13b5f16b.pngpowertop@.thumb.png.e51c2b65db45f85ade4037e949bb5af2.png


I've seen at the "sparsamste Systeme" (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LHvT2fRp7I6Hf18LcSzsNnjp10VI-odvwZpQZKv_NCI/edit?pli=1#gid=0), that some people with the nearly the same CPU but Pico PSU reaches values of under 10 Watt at idle. I know I will not reach that level because not having a pico and it's not possible with the amount of HHDs but a value around 15 Watt would be awseome.

If I change my powersupply to an Corsair 550 2021, will it have a valuable impact on my idle watts?

There is a strange behavior, that in deep idle my CPU jumps every 5-10 seconds to a high clock rate, without anything running in the background (as far as I can see - no docker or VMs active). Any Idea what it could be?


It seems that the following process causes spikes:
- Find ( 2 processes jumps up to 12 to 18% CPU usage)
- kworker event 4:3 and 4:0
- powertops jumps up to 10% usage (its open in a ssh session) - after closing the ssh session its gone

Solution:
- disable cache dir resolved the cpu peaks with "find" - is there a way to enable it but smooth the cpu usage? User dirs already disabled
- Kworker still creating peaks with 2% CPU usage but the clock rate goes up to 2-3 GHz for a view seconds, this causes a jump in watt usage from 24 watt to 36 watts

 

jump.thumb.png.d1da96f0e622eed61a0f7938affde75d.pngfind.thumb.png.be41d187aadcf96713c44cdc5d91ce65.pngkworker.thumb.png.4665a78f57224d733afc8ee2740be697.png

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16 minutes ago, ChristianSchmatz said:

that some people with the nearly the same CPU but Pico PSU reaches values of under 10 Watt at idle

Not possible for you as you are having 10 HDDs, which each consume 0.5 to 1.0 Watt.

 

17 minutes ago, ChristianSchmatz said:

ASM1166

It adds around 2W and it causes loss of even higher C-States like C9 or C10. Which costs you additional 2W. But some boards and especially ASRock are not able to reach C9, so this is something which shouldn't be your problem. But feel free to test it (disconnect the card and all HDDs and check if you are able to reach higher C-States).

 

19 minutes ago, ChristianSchmatz said:

There is a strange behavior, that in deep idle my CPU jumps every 5-10 seconds to a high clock rate, without anything running in the background

Is your WebGUI closed? This is important. If yes, then this is a behavior of unRAID itself. Since version 6.10 many users complain this. Feel free to try 6.9 to verify that it does not happen with this version:

http://unraid.gutt.it/

 

21 minutes ago, ChristianSchmatz said:

If I change my powersupply to an Corsair 550 2021, will it have a valuable impact on my idle watts?

No, because the most impact of this power supply is under 20W. Or maybe yes because your current power supply is really bad at low loads. But: the 2021 version is sold out in most countries. It's really hard to get and because of that extremely expensive.

 

23 minutes ago, ChristianSchmatz said:

Silverstone ASM1166 Controller, latest firmware
- 10x 7200 SATA drives (between 8TB to 20tb

An expensive step: Remove the ASM1166 and replace all HDDs against 22TB models, so you don't need more than 6 SATA ports. This would save 4 to 8 Watts.

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On 6/29/2023 at 5:32 AM, kiwijunglist said:

Hi,

 

Are these errors a problem (unraid 6.11.5) ?

 

root@manitoba:~# powertop --auto-tune
powertop: /lib64/libncursesw.so.6: no version information available (required by powertop)
powertop: /lib64/libtinfo.so.6: no version information available (required by powertop)
modprobe cpufreq_stats failed
Loaded 0 prior measurements
Cannot load from file /var/cache/powertop/saved_parameters.powertop
File will be loaded after taking minimum number of measurement(s) with battery only
RAPL device for cpu 0
RAPL device for cpu 0
Devfreq not enabled
glob returned GLOB_ABORTED
Cannot load from file /var/cache/powertop/saved_parameters.powertop
File will be loaded after taking minimum number of measurement(s) with battery only
Leaving PowerTOP

 

 

Same kind of errors here on unraid 6.12.1 :

 

root@Tower:~# powertop --quiet --auto-tune
powertop: /lib64/libncursesw.so.6: no version information available (required by powertop)
powertop: /lib64/libtinfo.so.6: no version information available (required by powertop)
Cannot load from file /var/cache/powertop/saved_parameters.powertop
File will be loaded after taking minimum number of measurement(s) with battery only 
Cannot load from file /var/cache/powertop/saved_parameters.powertop
File will be loaded after taking minimum number of measurement(s) with battery only 
root@Tower:~# 

 

What's wrong ?

 

Every (many) lines that are reported as "bad" in tunables, turn to "good" when using autotune command, but if I check later, all is back to their original "bad" status.

Edited by AmokK
tunables good and bad
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54 minutes ago, AmokK said:

but if I check later, all is back to their original "bad" status

You need to execute it after every reboot. For example by adding it to /boot/config/go or using the user scripts Plugin and use the "execute on array start" option.

 

Please try this command to hide the useless messages:

 

powertop --quiet --auto-tune &>/dev/null

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On 6/5/2023 at 3:09 PM, mgutt said:

Not even close to the RMX550x (2021) as the real magic happens under 25W which is visible on the (very small) size of the bottom left spot.

 

I tried the Supermicro PWS-341P-1H 340W Platinum as of my research it is the smallest platinum power supply available, but even this is extremely bad on low power:

https://gutt.it/seasonic-titanium-netzteil-bei-niedriglast-keine-option/

 

But it seems all recent Corsair Power Supplies have the same low power efficient feature:

https://www.tweakpc.de/hardware/tests/netzteile/corsair_rmx_shift_rm750x_rm850x_rm1000x/s02.php

Screenshot_20230605_200555.thumb.png.19cd6ff3eb60846d920a862b2bfaf0db.png

 

But: They start at 750W. Which can't be as efficient as 550W (or even smaller ones). Sadly there is still no update regarding the SF-lineup. Having an SFX power supply with 450W and this efficiency would be a dream.

 

The lian li sfx psu. Efficiency of 72% with only 2% load.

 

 

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13 minutes ago, Sorigra said:

SFX form factor

I hope Corsair will release a new version of the SF450, soon. But I fear they will follow the trend and release only extremely powerfully versions like SF1200 😔

 

An absolutely crazy situation. Many people want to save energy and instead they are getting extremely overclocked GPUs, PSUs and CPUs, like for example the 13th Gen Intel CPUs which only gain 45% more Performance while investing 385% more energy:

https://www.computerbase.de/2022-10/intel-core-i9-13900k-i7-13700-i5-13600k-test/2/

Screenshot_20230701_145254.thumb.png.a29c10f1f7cc779a543a650ab7224376.png

 

And only to highlight this: At 65W this CPU has equal power as the i7-12700K at over 200W. 

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5 hours ago, dopeytree said:

Arm chips would give crazy power efficiency.

With the downside of bad support of VMs and Docker containers and bad performance as many linux processes rely on high single thread performance, which usually isn't the main feature of an ARM CPU. For example 2.5G SMB transfers on the parity protected array can easily create 100% load on a single core of a high-power Intel CPU.

 

And it's not really worth the effort I think as a Kontron Mainboard (2x NVMe + various PCIe Slots + 6 SATA ports) or Lenovo Tiny PC (eg M920x supports 4x NVMe + 1x SATA) already consumes less then 5W in idle. 

 

In addition rumors say that Intel's Arrow Lake CPUs will focus much more on a high efficiency (>50% less power consumption than 13th Gen).

 

But even if you would have a super efficient ARM setup, the power consumption is highly influenced by the amount of HDDs and SSDs.

 

So I don't think Limetech will ever release an ARM version.

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On 6/30/2023 at 12:09 PM, mgutt said:

Not possible for you as you are having 10 HDDs, which each consume 0.5 to 1.0 Watt.

I was hoping each will consume more likely 0.4 watt in spindown, already reduced to 9HDD + 1 SSD

 

On 6/30/2023 at 12:09 PM, mgutt said:

It adds around 2W and it causes loss of even higher C-States like C9 or C10. Which costs you additional 2W. But some boards and especially ASRock are not able to reach C9, so this is something which shouldn't be your problem. But feel free to test it (disconnect the card and all HDDs and check if you are able to reach higher C-States).

This is fine, fist because my mainboard didnt go higher than C7 (can't change higher values in BIOS), and with all the HDDs i need that card. I already did my research and the ASM1166 is one of the best in terms of watt-usage

On 6/30/2023 at 12:09 PM, mgutt said:

Is your WebGUI closed? This is important. If yes, then this is a behavior of unRAID itself. Since version 6.10 many users complain this. Feel free to try 6.9 to verify that it does not happen with this version:

http://unraid.gutt.it/

Yes WebGUI is closed and I also wait couple of min before i check

 

On 6/30/2023 at 12:09 PM, mgutt said:

 

No, because the most impact of this power supply is under 20W. Or maybe yes because your current power supply is really bad at low loads. But: the 2021 version is sold out in most countries. It's really hard to get and because of that extremely expensive.

Ok ,so that means if I'm over 20 Watt it make no sense to try it out. Maybe if they will be getting more and more available again, i will order one and try it out.

 

On 6/30/2023 at 12:09 PM, mgutt said:

An expensive step: Remove the ASM1166 and replace all HDDs against 22TB models, so you don't need more than 6 SATA ports. This would save 4 to 8 Watts.

uff, this would be expensive. If my server would consume in idle 100+ watt I would take this in consideration, but for 4-8 watt less, this make no sense from an economical standpoint

 

One last question: how can I integrate Autotune permantenly without adjusting the values everytime manually after reboot? would be great to get some advise, I'm a newbee at Unraid and at the linux world.

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Hey guys. I used 

powertop --quiet --auto-tune

when I started to setup my server on I guess 6.12 rc. Now if I have a look at powertop all tunables are bad. Sometimes they also show as good (I guess when I use the powertop auto-tune command even though I get this "error"). If I try to execute powertop --quiet --auto-tune again I always get the following response:

 

Cannot load from file /var/cache/powertop/saved_parameters.powertop
File will be loaded after taking minimum number of measurement(s) with battery only 
Cannot load from file /var/cache/powertop/saved_parameters.powertop
File will be loaded after taking minimum number of measurement(s) with battery only

 

How can I fix this?

image.thumb.png.bca31b6b7dc43c5b95f869f70f5a359e.pngIt does not look good anyway. But I seem to have a good power consuption with 52 Docker containers running all the time. My Eaton USV says 20W and that with my router attached additionally to the server.

 

The setup:

Intel Core i5 13500

be quiet! PURE POWER 12 M 550W

 

ASUS Prime Z790M-PLUS D4 LGA1700

Kingston FURY Beast 64GB (2x32GB) 3200MHz DDR4

2x 1TB Samsung SSD 980 M.2 that are always running as cache

2x 4TB Western Digital Red that are always running as zfs pool

2x Toshiba MG09 Series MG09ACA18TA with shutdown

1x 6TB Toshiba X300 HDD with shutdown

LSI 9207-8i (IBM M5110) FLASHED TO IT MODE PCI-E 3.0 SAS2308 (probably the problem)

4x Tower-Fan Fractal Design Silent R2 120mm

 

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16 hours ago, ChristianSchmatz said:

how can I integrate Autotune permantenly without adjusting the values everytime manually after reboot?

And @sasbro97:

 

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/98070-reduce-power-consumption-with-powertop/?do=findComment&comment=1278540

 

 

1 hour ago, sasbro97 said:

But I seem to have a good power consuption with 52 Docker containers running all the time. My Eaton USV says 20W and that with my router attached additionally to the server.

I don't think this value is valid. I mean so man Dockers and the LSI card and the router... You should consider buying a better power meter. 

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