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Power

Standby TVs Waste Electricity, How About ACPI? 166

Posted by Cliff from the do-computers-waste-more-less-or-about-the-same dept.
twitter asks: "There's power management and there's standby, do you know the difference? The BBC is running story on how much electricity is wasted by TV standby mode. Thanks to the very useful EnergyStar program, I'd be the one in seven who thought they were saving electricity, with the standby button. I've been very happy with APM and hibernation on laptops, and want to do something similar with the desktops I use. What's the state of APM / ACPI Wake-on-LAN for Linux these days?" Slashdot touched on this issue, earlier in the week, but that article was more on TVs, not on computer power saving technologies.
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Standby TVs Waste Electricity, How About ACPI? More

Standby TVs Waste Electricity, How About ACPI?

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  • Convenience (Score:3, Interesting)

    by kestasjk ( 933987 ) on Saturday January 28, 2006 @06:38PM (#14590123) Homepage
    If it's more convenient we'll keep on wasting energy. The worst part is the standby circuits use practically no power compared to the transformers, which waste far more energy as heat than the standby circuitry uses. There should be a seperate battery power source powering the suspend-mode circuitry, which lets current into the transformer to provide the power needed for normal operation.. But of course this would cost extra, and consumers wouldn't pay extra for it even if it saved money on power bills in the long run.

    • Re: Convenience (Score:5, Insightful)

      by XanC ( 644172 ) on Saturday January 28, 2006 @06:46PM (#14590177)
      Okay... Suppose it costs an extra $10 for the battery, smart circuitry to run it, design costs, etc etc. Suppose disabling the transformer for standby saves you 2W. Suppose it's on standby year-round. That's 8,760 hours, or 17.52 kWh. Say 8 cents per kWh, you're now saving $1.40 per year. It would take over seven years for you to make up the initial cost.

      • Re: Convenience (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        And say there are 100 million machines with your reduced power consumption. How many power stations does that save, with all the polution not being belched into the air?

        Now lets say we look at other devices and repeat the exercise. Oh look, poisonous emissions are going down, respitory health proplems are down, medical bills are down, medical insurance (for those countries with retarted health care like ours) are down (nah, maybe not this one).

        • Re: Convenience (Score:5, Insightful)

          by XanC ( 644172 ) on Saturday January 28, 2006 @07:01PM (#14590278)
          Meanwhile we're filling the landfills and oceans with dinky little transformer-saving batteries.
          • Why use a battery? The standby circuitry in most devices could probably run for days on the charge in a $1.50 capacitor. Those tend to last a lot longer than a battery....

            • Re: Convenience (Score:5, Insightful)

              by alienw ( 585907 ) <alienw.slashdot@ ... inus threevowels> on Saturday January 28, 2006 @08:40PM (#14590794)
              The standby circuitry in most devices could probably run for days on the charge in a $1.50 capacitor.

              I'm an electrical engineer, and no, it can't. That's why there is a transformer. The real solution would be to get off your lazy ass and hit the power switch when you are done watching instead of turning the TV off with the remote. The other solution is to put in a very high-efficiency switching power supply, but those are very expensive.
              • I guess I should have read the article title more carefully. The subject of ACPI, etc. left me the impression that this was about electronics in general. TVs are a huge exception. Picture tube heaters draw substantial amounts of current. There's not much that can be done about that short of dramatically increasing the power-on time for the TV. For a TV, most of the standby power consumption isn't caused by the trickle of current that the standby electronics draw. It's caused by keeping the tube warm

                • Re: Convenience (Score:3, Interesting)

                  by alienw ( 585907 )
                  Actually, I don't think most modern TVs keep the tube warmed up. My TV takes the same time to turn on whether it's in standby mode or not. Nobody uses separate IR decoder chips, it's usually merged into the main ASIC and it's actually a microcontroller. If it's carefully optimized, it will draw about 0.3mA in sleep mode and a few milliamps when it runs. The real problem is the IR receiver (the ones I looked at draw 1-2mA), and more importantly the large relay which is supposed to switch on the main supp
                  • But you only need to hit the relay once, and only for a moment. Then, you just do a feedback loop off the transformer to keep the thing powered. You use a transistor to close a soft contact between a second storage cap and the relay. The relay closes, the transformer powers up, which then diverts power back to charge the cap and power the relay, and you have a second switching transistor to break the feedback to close the relay when you switch back to standby.

                    As for the IR receiver, Sharp electronics h

                    • It would take an awfully large capacitor to provide a reasonable standby time. The Sharp converters draw 100mA when transmitting, the 0.1mA figure is for the "shutdown mode". This makes sense, since an ordinary LED requires about 5mA to be visible and an IR LED needs to be very high-intensity.

                      Even assuming a power draw of 0.5mA (unrealistically low, in my opinion), capacitors would not provide enough runtime with simple circuitry. Let's say you put in a 1F supercap, and let's suppose the standby circuitr
              • The real solution would be to get off your lazy ass and hit the power switch when you are done watching instead of turning the TV off with the remote.

                What I understand is that most American TVs don't have a hard power switch. I think the better solution is to have two separate transformers. A small one dimensioned for the standby circuitry only and a big one for the rest of the electronics, one that is switched off during standby. Losses in a transformer are for a large part independent of the load, so a 6

                • Re: Convenience (Score:3, Interesting)

                  by alienw ( 585907 )
                  Actually, that's already how it's done, and that's exactly why a lot of power is wasted. A small, cheap transformer is usually a lot less efficient than a large one. A large transformer has thicker wire for the windings, so less resistive losses. It also has a higher-quality core, so there are fewer core losses. Of course, this is largely irrelevant, since the last time large transformers were used in consumer electronics was in the '70s. These days, almost all power supplies are switching types, whose
              • Don't you think they could parallel a tiny high-efficiency switching power supply into the inputs, just to supply the standby circuitry? It only needs milliwatts or less; I'd think there might even be an off-the-shelf chip that could do it in one or two parts.
            • The Xbox (as an example) runs for 10-12 hours on a 1 farad aerogel cap. Those cost about $5.00 in qty.

              While your idea has merit, the tech still does not do low power well enough for a cap to replace a battery.
              -nB
          • So our planet can be seen from space as a million pinpoints of light. It will camouflage our earth against the stars from the eyes of onlookers and would-be invaders, allowing us enough time to build up our technology and arsenal against them. C'mon, doesn't anybody see the big picture anymore? The media grabs ahold of small environmental issue and look what happens ... Think people. THINK!
          • FWIW, in a couple of weeks, it will be illegal to dispose of batteries in a landfill - they must be turned into a proper waste disposal or recycling facility.

            You do have a good point.

        • Yes, and now you have hundreds of tons of batteries in landfills. Not to mention, it takes a hell of a lot more energy (as well as raw materials) to make a battery. Great idea. Maybe you should like, use your brain, next time.
        • You have to take into account the amount of fossil fuels and other ingredients it takes to make an efficient electronic circuit. It is very well possible that it takes more resources building one than you will ever save using it.
        • And say there are 100 million machines with your reduced power consumption. How many power stations does that save, with all the polution not being belched into the air?

          For commodity items, there's a reasonably high correlation between cost and power usage. For items of a similar nature, we can extend that to general environmental impact. Creating those $10 transformers requires the use of energy, not to mention disposal costs. It may be that the energy required to create them, on average, is greater tha

      • Re: Convenience (Score:3, Interesting)

        by David Horn ( 772985 )
        Ignoring that fact adding a battery would probably use more energy in the manufacturing that it could possibly save, the point of the parent author was energy saving in general, not saving you money.

        I don't know how many TVs there are in the US, and I also suspect that shutting down the transformers in a large set will save more than 2W. I'm going to guess at 5W saved, over 500 million TVs. That's 44kWh per TV per year saved.

        In every TV, that's 2x10^10kWh of energy saved across the whole of the US. Those
        • I just got one of those Kill-a-Watts from ThinkGeek for Christmas. My 27" Sony TV uses ~100W while active (peaking at about 120 for a white screen). When it's "off", it uses 4W.

          It's a fallacy to point out the total energy used by such TVs. I only control my TV. I control those 4W. Those 4W make no difference.

          50-100 years before serious energy problems? Are you basing that on anything but intuition? There are plenty of energy alternatives out there, it just hasn't made economic sense to develop on

          • Excuse me? You're saying that when we run out of power we'll invent a brand new source of energy out of desperation? Fusion is up in the air at the moment, nuclear will work if you ever get round the environmentalists, and wind and tidal power can provide about 5%.

            It's a fallacy to point out the total energy used by such TVs. I only control my TV. I control those 4W. Those 4W make no difference.

            The sheer arrogance of that statement astonishes me. Yes, on your own you won't make a difference, but w

            • It's a fallacy to point out the total energy used by such TVs. I only control my TV. I control those 4W. Those 4W make no difference.

              The sheer arrogance of that statement astonishes me. Yes, on your own you won't make a difference, but when EVERYONE has your attitude you're in for one helluva shock when the oil and gas reserves run out. I also hate to break it to you but I bet my right hand that no new, reliable, large scale energy source is going to appear within my lifetime.

              Look, my workstation avera

              • Look, my workstation averages 230W.

                Good. There aren't many workstations that average that amount.

                The 4W of my TV is less than 2% of that, and my workstation is only a tiny part of my overall energy usage. Even if there are 6 billion of me, and our standby TVs are increasing our energy usage by .09%, 4W each does not bring affect the timetable of your Armaggedon.

                If that is true, then:
                - For every 50 TVs made, each "full on" for 8 hours a day and taking 200W a piece, you have to generate enough po

            • Stop Blaming Environmentalists (was: Convenience) (Score:4, Insightful)

              by nathanh ( 1214 ) on Saturday January 28, 2006 @09:36PM (#14591043) Homepage
              Fusion is up in the air at the moment, nuclear will work if you ever get round the environmentalists,

              Yeah, because those damn environmentalists wield so much power and have so much money, why they're practically running the US government!

              and wind and tidal power can provide about 5%.

              That's nonsense. Slashdot ran an article on this just recently. Global wind power in class 3 areas alone could generate 72 terawatts which is 60 times global consumption [physorg.com]. Class 3 wind turbines are financially comparable to brown coal. North America has the greatest number of class 3 areas in the world.

              But let's not stop at wind power. A home with solar panels for hot water (not the expensive, dirty and inefficient photovoltaic) saves 50% on heating costs. The panels pay for themselves in 5 years and have a 25 year lifetime. They are maintenance free (they are effectively just black plastic pipes behind glass sheets) and easy to repair when damaged (simple plumbing that a home handyman could do).

              But let's not stop at solar and wind power. Changing your light bulbs from incandescent to energy efficient flouros will save 75% on lighting costs. Modern flouros are compact, come in a variety of shapes, only need to be changed once every 5-10 years, degrade slowly rather than blowing suddenly at inconvenient times, and have equivalent candela output to a 75W incandescent.

              But let's not stop at solar power and wind power and energy efficiency. Your SUV gets 10MPG yet a comfortable Subaru Legacy has equivalent seating and storage but gets 33MPG. Your average driver will save between $750 and $1250 per year while simultaneously slashing their automobile oil consumption by two thirds. That's financially sensible and enviromentally friendlier.

              The solutions are here right now. You need to stop waiting for the magic silver bullet like fusion, or blaming "environmentalists" for preventing fission, or wondering why you're spending $2000+ per year on fuel for your gargantuan SUV, and simply start using the technology that is here right now and is economical right now and is practical right now. You can make the difference right now.

              • Contrary to popular belief not everyone in the US owns a gas guzzling SUV... In fact my american car (Chrysler) gets better MPG than the subaru you mentioned.

                As for everything else...

                I did change my light bulbs, the effect I have to say seems negligable... Either my power company doens't bother to look at my meter to figure out energy use, or my lighting costs are fairly low and therefor the change made to small a difference to notice...

                I don't have solar panels used for hot water... My house is already built (& I didn't build it), so the cost to change things now is to much for my fairly average salary to cover... I could try to get a loan to pay for it, but that would nuke any savings I'd see for years... I also doubt anyone would give me a loan... Winter would also cause some issues for this... Heating bills are largest in the winter and solar isn't very effective in general when the solar panels are covered in snow...

                As for wind.... That's not a change I can make... Even if I did live in a good area (& I think winter would kill any effective use where I live), I'm not likely to be able to put up a tower... First their is the money issue again... Then I think my city would probably frown on it to... When I looked into wireless internet options I found out my area is heavily restricted on building anything over 30" tall... Less would probably not be so good with the number of trees around here...

                Nice ideas, but practicality is questionable...

                • I don't have solar panels used for hot water... [...] Winter would also cause some issues for this... Heating bills are largest in the winter and solar isn't very effective in general when the solar panels are covered in snow...

                  Everyone says solar, because it's trendy. Truth is, you'd almost certainly get much better use out of a ground-source heat-pump. Doesn't matter what the sun is doing, you can get your home heated or cooled, and all the hot water you need, by a single unit, probably only costing you

                  • Have you ever USED a heat pump in any area that gets below freezing in winter? They work well as air-conditioners but provide very little heat. They do suck lots of electricity though.
                    • "Have you ever USED a heat pump in any area that gets below freezing in winter?"

                      Perhaps you missed the GEOTHERMAL qualifier? Instead of exchanging heat with the air it uses the ground which is at a fairly constant temperature (warmer than air in winter, cooler in summer).

                      Solves most of the problems of a heat pump but at significant cost.
                    • Have you ever USED a heat pump in any area that gets below freezing in winter?

                      Not just any heatpump... a closed-loop ground-source heatpump. Or an open-loop well-water source heat-pump, if you already have a well.

                      It doesn't matter what the tempurature of the air is, the ground stays within a couple degrees, year-round. It may be -20F above ground, but it will still be around 65F once you go down about 30 feet.
                • Interesting "bragging-rights": 'I get more than 30MPG'.... Being a Brit, I'd see 30MPG as pretty expensive running costs. Admittedly, not all Brits these days see things the same way, we're following the Americans into this "I need a 3+ litre 4WD monster to get the kids to school" mentality. Personally, I need to get myself to work and back, so I've got a (rather overkill) 1.3 litre VW Polo for my 10 mile daily journey. For historical reasons (I used to pound the country until recently, doing about 20k mil
                  • I wasn't trying to 'brag', I was stating the fact that his option wasn't even all that good at what he seemed to be griping about... My car is quite big enough for 5 people and it gets good gas mileage compared to most peoples choice in vehicle. What I mean is you don't have to trade off capability for better MPG...

                    Btw it's nice that you only have to drive 10 miles a day... My commute is 25 miles each direction. That's figuring I don't need to stop anywhere else as well. I don't have much choice in that. I
                    • Until recently, my daily commute was 25 miles in each direction, which was nice enough. It's great to be just down the road from work (though it gives me less of an excuse to work-from-home when I choose to!). New company, new rules - I can drive my own car for up to 100 miles (I choose the old Polo for the office, the 2003 Mondeo for longer drags), but use a rental car for trips over 100 miles round-trip (that's pretty much all of them). It's a load of hassle getting a hire car delivered and picked up, bu
                • I don't have solar panels used for hot water... My house is already built (& I didn't build it), so the cost to change things now is to much for my fairly average salary to cover..

                  Solar hot water is extremely cheap. You can build a system yourself with little more than some cheap irrigation tubing, and a pump.

              • The rest of your post is great, and spot-on, but I do have a question about the nuclear argument: environmentalists may not have the deepest pockets, but they have succeeded in stopping new nuclear power plant contruction dead in its tracks in the US. We haven't commissioned a new nuclear power plant (to my knowledge; I'd love to be wrong on this one, so let me know if I missed something) since the seventies, have we?

              • "That's nonsense. Slashdot ran an article on this just recently. Global wind power in class 3 areas alone could generate 72 terawatts which is 60 times global consumption. Class 3 wind turbines are financially comparable to brown coal. North America has the greatest number of class 3 areas in the world."
                You can not control the wind. Without good storage you will have issues also they are noisy and no one knows what will happen to the climate if you extract that level of energy from wind. If nothing else you

          • Re: Convenience (Score:3, Informative)

            by alienw ( 585907 )
            It's a fallacy to point out the total energy used by such TVs.

            It's not a fallacy. There isn't just one of those TVs, there are hundreds of millions of them. They all use energy. Legislative mandates for more efficient electronics would go a long way. Right now, efficiency is simply not a criterion the manufacturer even attempts to optimize when developing a power supply; cost is a much, much bigger factor. This obviously needs to change.

            Are you basing that on anything but intuition?

            Don't be childish.
          • It's a fallacy to point out the total energy used by such TVs. I only control my TV. I control those 4W. Those 4W make no difference.

            Perhaps you've never heard of the Tragedy of the Commons [wikipedia.org]? You should read about it.

            Here's an excerpt from Wikipedia, concerning herders sharing a piece of common pasture:

            The division of these components is unequal: the individual herder gains all of the advantage [of adding an extra animal], but the disadvantage is shared between all herders using the pasture. Consequently, fo

      • Okay... Suppose it costs an extra $10 for the battery, smart circuitry to run it, design costs, etc etc.

        Or you could run the standby circuit using the battery, charger, etc that's already built in to your computer to run the CMOS clock...

      • If that same battery serves another marketable purpose, then perhaps the cost can be justified.

        For example, if the battery provides a short duration of RAM power, then a desktop computer could survive a power blink just like laptops can today. Have you ever been in an office when the power goes out and everyone except the laptop users cry out in anguish? Think of the battery as a mini, on-board UPS.

        So instead of just saying that it takes 7 years to recoup the cost, the manufacturer can spin it as a market

  • Software suspend: ACPI/APM independent (Score:4, Informative)

    by TeknoHog ( 164938 ) on Saturday January 28, 2006 @06:44PM (#14590158) Homepage Journal
    Linux has software suspend in the kernel. It's the same as hibernation in Windows. Memory contents are saved to swap, and when you boot the same kernel again, it picks up where it left off. It's independent of APM/ACPI and you can use it on any Linux machine.

    While the vanilla version works basically, Suspend2 [suspend2.net] is a more complete implementation. I use it on my laptop regularly.


  • ACPI only uses your power until you are hacked [slashdot.org], then somebody else has the power.

  • WOL (Score:4, Informative)

    by SillyNickName4me ( 760022 ) <dotslash@bartsplace.net> on Saturday January 28, 2006 @06:51PM (#14590217) Homepage
    WakeOnLan is basicly a matter of sending a 'magic packet' to the MAC address of the comuter you want to wake up. There is no need ofr the OS on that machine to actually support that functionality (except for there being a few cards around that require WOL to be re-enabled after each boot).

    Sending the 'magic packet' is not difficult, and there is a variety of tools that can do this, including a ready made perl script, on a gentoo system, type 'emerge wakeonlan'. I bet it is available with most other distributions as well.

    • The BIOS must though - and a lot don't do so, even those which have WOL supporting chipsets on the motherboard.
      • The bios has to support it, the nic has to support it and it may require a cable between your mobo and nic in order to work..

        When your firmware and hardware don't support this correctly then obviously it is not going to work, regardless of what OS you are trying to boot..

        The question I replied to was asking specifically about using this with Linux, that more or less implies that the hardware being used itself is fully capable. My answer was to point out that Linux has nothing to do with the matter in virtua

    • Re:WOL (Score:2)

      by fm6 ( 162816 )
      You're kind of missing the point. Of course support for WOL has to be in the LAN card. But that support isn't much use if the LAN card isn't getting power. So using WOL expends a small amount of power even when the system is off, just as the instant-on feature of TV sets does.
      • You're kind of missing the point. Of course support for WOL has to be in the LAN card. But that support isn't much use if the LAN card isn't getting power. So using WOL expends a small amount of power even when the system is off, just as the instant-on feature of TV sets does.

        Without power it is not going to work at all, seems rather obvious really. A powered off system with wake on lan enabled is going to come a lot closer to the 1 watt initiative of EPA then almost any TV on standby mode however. Indeed a
    • But that's *not* how ACPI LAN power control works...

      On Intel boards with their advanced ACPI (yes, redundant... their terminology) controlers (BMCs), there's a 16Mhz ARM7 computer running even when your machine's power is off. It has a back-door connection to the intel ethernet chip, and can process ACPI packets to do just about anything you could do to your machine if you were standing in front of it, but over the network. It sits between the front panel buttons and the chipset, so it can 'push' any of tho
      • What you describe is how exactly the system can be turned on upon receiving a network packet. Of course you can do a bit more with this then just receiving a 'wake up call'. I f you can respond to that and given you have access to the correct registers, you can do a lot in response to any specific network packet.

        That there needs to be some intelligence for actually responding to such a packet seems somewhat obvious to me. What kind of 'intelligence' this is I never mentioned, it is relevant to the main arti
        • Standard WOL, however, uses very little power in comparison to IPMI, which is why I made the distinction.

          it however has nothing to do with the post I replied to which asked about using WOL with Linux.

          Your post was at the top level, and not a reply to anything. Perhaps that is the source of the confusion.
  • It's important to remember that you don't need to worry about wasted energy if you live in a cold location and use electric heat.
    • Maybe it is different in certain countries that heavily tax petroleum products, but in many places, using electricity is not the cheapest way to heat, so it would be a bit of a waste.

      I really don't think it is a huge deal, each TV might draw 5W on standby. It varies by TV, so check your manual. All my manuals for line-powered electronic products specify standby power and it's not much. There are plenty of good flourescent bulbs with higher frequency ballasts and a "warm" looking color output such that sw
    • Yes, actually, it never really gets cold enough here in Seattle that I have to use my electric heater in the apartment.

      I have my computers on 24/7 for convenience, and I actually have to keep my window open just so my apartment doesn't get too hot.

      Thus, by mere desire for convenience, I generate the heat I need to survive comfortably anyways, and I've never turned on the heater, which is electric, and would cost me more money to run regardless of if I were turning my computers off or not.

  • Compact Flourescent (Score:4, Insightful)

    by the eric conspiracy ( 20178 ) on Saturday January 28, 2006 @07:17PM (#14590369)
    You will save far more energy by investing in some compact flourescent light bulbs.

    • Agreed. I have a friend who religiously turns his computer off (speakers, monitor and printer individually) to save power. It's an old 300MHZ Compaq so it's not even using that much power running..

      His house is fitted throughout with 100W incandecent lightbulbs. I haven't checked, but I suspect he also leaves his TV and amp on standby.

      • Re:Compact Flourescent (Score:3, Informative)

        by brunes69 ( 86786 )

        I haven't checked, but I suspect he also leaves his TV and amp on standby.

        I don't know what model TV you have, but if I unplug mine to get it out of standby, I lose all the programmed in channels and settings. Next time I plug it back in I have to reprogram it all. Same with my reciever.

        No thanks, it's worth the $1 a month.

    • I think compact fluorescents are now a no-brainer for anyone with any interest in power management.

      If someone's looking at ACPI or Standby appliances you can pretty much guarantee they've already got insulated dwellings, efficient vehicles and compact fluorescents bulbs.

      Just try to avoid 'Elite' branded ones. I've had three die after six months use in different sockets.

  • ACPI ? What ACPI ? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Hymer ( 856453 )
    ...servers run 24x365.25 no need for ACPI here.
    Save power somwhere else...
    • Even if your systems are on all the time, you can use CPU speed throttling to save some watts - I bet most 24x7 servers are not at full capacity all the time. Packages exist for several operating systems (OpenBSD and Linux at least) to dynamically throttle CPU clock speed, thereby reducing power consumption. It isn't likely to be a huge saving, but even a couple of % across a number of machines can add up to quite a saving.
      • It's quite a large savings. My computer (the entire system, measured by /proc/acpi, including LCD panel) uses 50W at 2.2 GHz and 20-25W at 800 MHz.
        • I'm not sure if desktop systems will necessarily benefit to such a degree, servers probably to less of a degree, but dynamically cutting CPU clock on a server farm could net a significant savings.

          At least using notebook systems can have other benefits, two of them are mobility and sound output.

    • Re:ACPI ? What ACPI ? (Score:3, Informative)

      by arivanov ( 12034 )

      Same here. But they have both ACPI and CPU frequency scaling (aka centrino, powernow, longrun, longhaul) enabled.

      The reasons are fairly simple.

      • Keeping the servers cooler decreases the electricity bill by up to 20% from ACPI and up to 75% from cpufreq for an average Pentium/Xeon based corporate install when idle. Athlon/Opteron numbers are comparable. This also decreases airconditioner wear and tear.
      • If your servers are well designed and have temperature controlled fans (all IBMs and Compaqs fall in thi
      • My SAN uses more power than all my servers together...
        MTBF is irrelevant if the MTBF is much higher than the expected lifetime of the server... All our server failures have either been after max. 1/2 year (production fault) or after the end of the expected lifetime (wich is 5 years for a PC server). I do however have running servers (IBM PCServer 325, Compaq ProLiant 2500 and some DEC) wich are over 10 years old... but they don't do servers that way any longer, do they ?
        Temperature of a transistor decre

        • MTBF is MEAN TIME BEFORE FAILURE not Time before guaranteed failure. It is the Expected Value of your failure distribution. By increasing your MTBF, you are decreasing the probability of failure within your estimated installation lifetime. As a result over your projected installation lifetime the overall number of failures and overall maintenance expenditure decreases. When managing 100+ servers it is guaranteed to have some failures due to normal wear and tear even during the warranty period. Not trying to

  • I don't understand why there should be hardware standby and sleep functions. The hardware should be provided with a means of reading and writing its entire state. When you power down, the contents of RAM and all the hardware state should get written to the hard drive. When you power up normally, instead of going through a lengthy boot process, it should read and restore the state the contents of RAM and the hardware state, and pick up where it left off.

    Of course, that would require hardware to be designed..
    • I don't understand why there should be hardware standby and sleep functions. The hardware should be provided with a means of reading and writing its entire state. When you power down, the contents of RAM and all the hardware state should get written to the hard drive. When you power up normally, instead of going through a lengthy boot process, it should read and restore the state the contents of RAM and the hardware state, and pick up where it left off.

      Linux's software suspend does just this, see my oth

  • S1 sucks, S3 is great, if it works for you... (Score:5, Informative)

    by evilviper ( 135110 ) on Sunday January 29, 2006 @02:05AM (#14592027) Journal
    I've been trying to get power management to work on PCs for over a decade now, and we're still not there...

    S1 (aka. sleep) works on most every system, since it's been around forever, but it'll only save you maybe 2% over the system being normally up and running (doing useful tasks).

    S3 (aka. suspend) is the damn-good one. It only uses about 0.5 watts more power than your computer being completely off (I suppose it might be different with a more effecient power supply like a Seasonic). However, it's damn near impossible to get it to work. Windows XP, Linux, FreeBSD. Tried on dozens of completely different machines, and I've never seen it work, once. The drivers for pretty much ALL the hardware need to be written with APCI in-mind.

    Hell, if I could just find a list of the motherboards, soundcards, and other components that have drivers on FreeBSD6 that will resume successfully from S3, I'd put together a couple systems with just those componets. Electricity in CA isn't cheap, and I'd be saving lots with instant-on from S3. No more boot-up waits, no more opening-up the same apps every time, etc. Just hit a button, and start working (as soon as the monitor can warm up).

    S5 (aka. hibernate) writes out RAM to disk, and reads from disk upon restart. I'm not a particular fan of this method, as it would take quite a while to resume on a system with a large ammount of RAM. Still, it has the potential to be even lower power provided you're going to be away long enough.

    So, in my experience, you're still screwed... Just shut-off the machine when you're done.
    • I guess the milllions of us laptop users who use S3 on a regular basis must be dreaming then. Linux's support for S3 blows. I don't think I've had it fail for me on Windows XP once. I do IT support, and I've only had two or three cases of a computer not being able to wake from S3 suspend on Windows XP. This is the ONLY REASON why I don't use Linux on my laptop, and it's a damn shame.
      • I guess the milllions of us laptop users who use S3 on a regular basis must be dreaming then

        Okay, fine. I should have specified "Desktop" or "Workstation" systems. It's much easier to make it work on a notebook, where everything is built-in.

      • Linux's support for S3 blows.

        Not really. It works; the problem is usually working around little hardware gotchas. This is where having a team of tech engineers do that work for you comes in, which is why it generally works better with Windows than with Linux--with Windows, HP, Dell, and friends do all the work for you (and, notably, for Microsoft. Great scheme for Microsoft!). With Linux, since it's not supported on the hardware, you have to do it yourself.

        It works anywhere between fine out of the b

        • And here I thought the advantage to open source was that other people would do most of the work for you. In the end it is closed source that gets all the good help.

          • And here I thought the advantage to open source was that other people would do most of the work for you.

            No. with you.

            In the end it is closed source that gets all the good help.

            Good help with hardware? Certainly. Wellll, no.

            See, you have to be popular enough to get the good help with hardware; it has nothing to do with closed or open source. If a new OS came out tomorrow, they'd face the same problems Linux is facing--the fact that lots of bits of hardware are quirky (or even broken), so to supp

      • The times I've noticed S3 doesn't work right...

        1) Timbuktu doesn't seem to work 100% right under XP SP2 on some configurations, and especially causes problems with S3 mode (like not being able to resume from S3 without a almost 4 minute delay)
        2) Video drivers - I've seen them corrupt the screen horribly on restore or even worse force you to turn the machine off completely
        3) Cheapie sound cards - same situation as video

        Upgrading the driver or removing the problem program usually works like a charm.
    • S5 (aka. hibernate) writes out RAM to disk, and reads from disk upon restart. I'm not a particular fan of this method, as it would take quite a while to resume on a system with a large ammount of RAM. Still, it has the potential to be even lower power provided you're going to be away long enough.

      I use Linux's software suspend (which I've already mentioned too many times in this discussion :) It only takes a few seconds to restore 512MB of RAM. One reason it achieves this is that RAM contents are compres

    • Short answer: Don't use VIA chipset motherboards.

      Longer answer: I have never got S3 to work on a box running some variety of VIA chipset mobo. I have got it to work beautifully in every setup I have used that had SIS/Intel/Nvidia/AMD chipset on various W2k/XP boxes at work and home.

      Note that "beautifully" does not imply that getting initially working setup was painless operation. But with correct combination of (WHQ) drivers it has always been doable. On current version of home/work boxes it was pretty much
    • S3 (aka. suspend) is the damn-good one. It only uses about 0.5 watts more power than your computer being completely off (I suppose it might be different with a more effecient power supply like a Seasonic). However, it's damn near impossible to get it to work. Windows XP, Linux, FreeBSD. Tried on dozens of completely different machines, and I've never seen it work, once. The drivers for pretty much ALL the hardware need to be written with APCI in-mind

      Nearly every notebook supports S3 just fine, as do most co
    • My Powerbook G4 goes through several dozen sleep/resume cycles between patch/reboots. I just close the lid and it sleeps, and when I open the lid, by the time I get my screensaver password entered, it has already reconnected to my WLAN, reconnected to AIM, reconnected all of my SSH shares to my servers and resumed any SFTP transfers, and is downloading my email.
  • Well, you have to remember that ACPI was developed in response to the orders-of-magnitude larger waste of electricity as a result of equipment being left on indiscriminately, compared to standby or hibernation (ACPI G1 S3/S4 [wikipedia.org]). The chief power drain was (and is) obviously the CRT. Whether deliberately or inadvertantly, these things weren't getting turned off when not in use. Of course, ACPI can also spin down the hard drives and send the system into standby or the more efficient (and less reliable) hibern

  • Kill-a-Watt (Score:3, Informative)

    by TClevenger ( 252206 ) on Monday January 30, 2006 @02:10PM (#14599932)
    If you are truly concerned about what your equipment uses, get a Kill-a-Watt [the-gadgeteer.com] meter. Very easy to use, includes a KWh counter as well as an instant wattage display. You can find it around the 'Net for $27 or less.

    Some things I've tested recently:

    My PC speakers use 40 watts, even when "turned off". Result: they're on a power strip with a switch.
    My HP Laserjet 2100N uses 12-16 watts (depending on the fan), when in Power Saver. Result: it gets turned off when not in use.
    My PIII-650 desktop server consumed about 50 watts when idle. Result: replaced it with a Toshiba Tecra PIII-650 (with a broken screen, cheap on eBay), which draws 14 watts when idle.

    I also realized that my Powerbook power supply consumes less than 1 watt when plugged in but no laptop is connected, or about 2 watts when the laptop is plugged in and fully charged, so I'm not as concerned about unplugging it anymore.

    My next checks: the TV's, older transformer-based clock radios, wall warts and the deep freeze. I will also take running "baseline" checks of my major appliances (fridge, furnace, washer), so I can recheck them once a year and identify when an appliance is running too hard (bad motor bearing, etc.)

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