Save energy by making use of all C-States

[BigDave]

Fascinating, so we're all affected by this? Or just a couple people?

I'M AFFECTED SIR! GENERAL SIR!
i've been waiting weeks to do that :D

 

[freenas-supero]

My guess is that everybody in the 9.10 branch is affected but I may be wrong. Devs said an update would be pushed within the next few weeks.

I strongly encourage people to manually retrieve their HDD temps with Smart using CLI while a solution to make email notification is being rolled out.

 

[BigDave]

I strongly encourage people to manually retrieve their HDD temps with Smart using CLI while a solution to make email notification is being rolled out.

You can install a script that does that and the report is emailed to you on whatever schedule you wish. Mine comes every morning
at 5am and I read the report with my coffee!

 

[Handle]

FreeNAS (by which, you mean, FreeBSD) is not an energy hog. But it does require the user to configure things correctly.

When the two 4TB HDDs I added are in spindown the system uses around 40W when idle vs ~55W when idle running FreeNAS with activated C-States and smartd. That's quite a huge difference. What else could one do to bring down the power usage of FreeNAS?

 

[DrKK]

activated C-States and smartd.

..? Is that supposed to say "powerd"?

 

[Handle]

..? Is that supposed to say "powerd"?

Yes, sorry, powerd of course.

 

[Borja Marcos]

I suggested the usage of C-states to reduce consumption a bit back in 2015 (according to an Ubiquiti mPower average consumption for a Microserver Gen8 went roughly from 47 W to 45 W, but Cyberjock warned that using C-states can sometimes lead to problems.

Not all hardware supports them properly. (Peecees, shocking!)

This is the original thread.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...n-the-daemon-and-the-shark.26519/#post-168389

 

[freenas-supero]

Just A FU for this topic since I couldn't get significant results on the previous platform (2x L5420). With a more modern Xeon E3-1220 , I see a decrease of about 18-22w out of a 100w base load, so I'd say C-States in FreeNAS definitely work!!

 

[Allan Jude]

Hate to necro this thread, but there is a better way to control this. Instead of setting the tunable for every CPU, just change the default:

sysctl hw.acpi.cpu.cx_lowest=C8

Will save you a lot of clicking in the GUI when you have 48 or 64 CPUs

 

[russnas]

Works for me, saving roughly 10-15 watts, checking with a kilo-watt meter

https://www.thomas-krenn.com/en/wiki/Processor_P-states_and_C-states