Hi I'm running a self hosted web server in my room. It's going to be on pretty much all day. I was wondering is there anything I can do to save energy? It's a bit expensive to purchase my own server from a host. It's much better if it's your own. There's no restrictions.

It's not going to be that busy so I guess I could turn off the hdd after so long. but is there anything else? It's an athlon xp processor running ubuntu server gutsy

Doubt it will turn the drive off much. The only way to be less energy users is a small basic computer and leting it load the os off a USB stick and run the OS in memory. Not harddrive or cdrom required. Run a low power cpu that would not require a fan for cooling and the power supply would be say a wall wart. Many very basic SBC systems out there.

Brian

how can you load an os without a cdrom or hard disk ? you need some kind of storage device to load the data into the ram. Also ram isn't permanent. It looses the data when the comp is turned off. Are you saying to use a floppy?

As long as the machine can boot from USB then you should be able to boot from a USB memory stick. Load the OS in system memory and run it from there. I am kind of thinking more of flash rom eeprom system like so.

Brian

If you're that concerned about the power it will draw - I mean, it's probably less than a 500W power supply - your best bet would be optimizing the system:

1) Optimize software - get as little disk I/O as you can, and eliminate any unneeded processor activity. Shut down anything that you don't need.

2) Optimize hardware - get rid of everything that draws power and isn't needed. I don't know what type of hardware you're running, but you can try to slim down the PS, more power-efficient hard drives, etc.

All this has trade-offs in terms of reliability and power. For example, my personal development server - off-site, so I don't have quick physical access to it - draws a maximum of 1500W through three 500W power supplies. I can lose a power supply, 2 disks, and a processor without impacting functionality.

How much power do I need for 2x256MB ram Athlonxp 2gig, lan card and usb controller. I've gone turned off everything I don't need like KB/mouse. It'll be a terminal server so it doesn't really need it. Actually running completely off ram is good because then if it crashes I can just restart it. I'vehad experiences where my system crashed then after a reboot I noticed some files have gone. even though I never opened them lol. I've even unplugged the power/hdd activity leds lol.

if am running as terminal server then remotely administering it using a putty, i don't need a graphics card do I?

the power supply being a switching power supply will only produce power as needed. The biggest draw is during power on of machine. Once up then the load is lighten. So the power supply is not always producing 500watts.

Brian

I have no idea what the power draw specs are on your mobo and processor - you'd have to look them up in manufacturer spec sheets. But do you really need that much processing power for a web server? 2GHz is pretty fast for a simple personal web server...

Sounds like, with a switching power supply, it's about as stripped down as it can be. You're probably drawing about the least power as you can with a 2GHz processor.

I've been running Linux with journaling filesystems for 5 years, and despite many "play" machines that were powered down hard (or power loss, or locked up and had plug pulled) I've never experienced data loss.

The main power draw in most machines are hard drives, but I assume you're running a consumer-level machine with SATA or PATA (IDE/EIDE) drives at low speeds (5400 or 7200 rpm) so you don't have much to worry about. If you're running something like a 15k RPM SCSI disk, then you could probably save some power...

PS - Assuming you're saying that the server isn't going to have a keyboard/mouse/monitor, the nomenclature is "headless server".