• Power Saving with Proxmox

    From poindexter FORTRAN@1337:3/178 to All on Fri Sep 25 07:04:36 2026
    Here's an interesting article about using powersaving features in the
    Linux Kernel with Proxmox.

    https://solariz.de/posts/26/09-proxmox-homeserver-powersavings/

    Most of my Proxmox servers are running idle (or close to it) most of the
    time, I'm tempted to try this out.



    ... Is something missing?
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  • From Mindsurfer@1337:1/104 to poindexter FORTRAN on Fri Sep 25 16:33:09 2026
    Re: Power Saving with Proxmox
    By: poindexter FORTRAN to All on Fri Sep 25 2026 07:04:36

    Here's an interesting article about using powersaving features in the Linux Kernel with Proxmox.

    https://solariz.de/posts/26/09-proxmox-homeserver-powersavings/

    Most of my Proxmox servers are running idle (or close to it) most of the time, I'm tempted to try this out.

    i just changed that governor setting as it seems to be on performance by default.
    My connected HDDs spin down when they are not used already.
    Proxmox dashboard shows round about 8-10% CPU (Intel N100) on idle for 30 LXCs.

    Mindsurfer

    ps: i will check all the infos in that linked article later. maybe i can save some more watts =)
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  • From Arelor@1337:3/191 to poindexter FORTRAN on Sat Oct 3 05:57:08 2026
    Re: Power Saving with Proxmox
    By: poindexter FORTRAN to All on Fri Sep 25 2026 07:04 am

    Here's an interesting article about using powersaving features in the
    Linux Kernel with Proxmox.

    https://solariz.de/posts/26/09-proxmox-homeserver-powersavings/

    Most of my Proxmox servers are running idle (or close to it) most of the time, I'm tempted to try this out.



    ... Is something missing?

    Thanks for the link.

    Switching the CPU governor is a no brainer but it is also deceptive. If your Powersaving CPU gets into high load at any point, it takes more power for it to complete a given task than if it was tuned for Performance, because it takes much longer to complete the task.

    Adjusting the drives standby timer is also a bit tricker because it might reduce the lifespan of the hard drives. If you have frequent highs and lows of hard drive activity then you will be starting and stopping your hard drives all day long, which is very bad for the mechanical parts, specially if you use desktop or server hard drives, which aren't designed for this sort of operation. If you really want to mess with the standby timers of the drives then you will probably have to use big write caches (which can be done in ZFS) to ensure the filesystem is not waking the drives continuously. This comes with other issues so I am not sure it is worth it.


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