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Lemmings, what's your self hosted server power usage?

I'll just come out and say it: 50W. I know, I know an order of magnitude above what's actually needed to host websites, media center and image gallery.

But it is a computer I had on-hand and which would be turned on a quarter of the day anyway. And these 50W also warm my home, although this is less efficient than the heat pump, of course.

What's your usage? What do you host?

ssdfsdf3488sd ,

50 watts is maybe halfof one of my 10 gig switches...

owen ,

Damn son, what're you runnung?

ssdfsdf3488sd ,

dell powerconnect 8164's and arista 7050tx's . House is wired with copper so 10 gig copper is what I have to use and that's power hungry.

twei ,

Damn, your switches are using that much? I have a MikroTik CRS518 and it's using like 40 Watts on idle (transceivers not included)

ssdfsdf3488sd ,

yah, my house is wired with copper and 10 gig copper uses a lot of power. It doesn't really help that the new slightly less power hungry 48 port 10 gig switches are thousands of dollars. I'm using 100 to 150ish watts per 10 gig switch to be able to buy the switch for under 500 bucks instead of using 60-100 watts and paying 2-5k per switch...

possiblylinux127 ,
@possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip avatar

1.21 giggawats

elephantium ,
@elephantium@lemmy.world avatar

What do you get when you cross Family guy with BTTF?

1.21 giggetywatts!

merthyr1831 ,

No idea!

Going from publicly-available info though:

Rpi4B - 6.4W max (more like 5 in real world usage)

Cpu case fan - 1.4W

2x SSD - ~6W each

13.8 to ~18 depending on what the SSDs are pulling i guess. I use it as an *arr seedbox and plex server (up to 1080p h264 works flawlessly!) as well as nextcloud

walden ,

Good timing for this thread. I just finished consolidating 2 computers worth of fun into 1 newer computer that can do it all. I sold my wife on the idea with electricity as the reasoning.

In the end, it uses 30 watts less, which is not as much as I had hoped. That's about $5 a month.

180 watts with an i5-13400, 9 spinning disks, 1 M.2 SSD, no extra GPU, 24 port switch (powers 3 AP's), modem, Mikrotik router, and a large UPS. I wonder if the UPS uses any power as a trickle charge for the batteries.

slazer2au ,

What are your electricity prices that 30w costs €5/m

buzziebee ,

Spain would probably be around that much if my calculations are correct.

walden ,

30w x 24 hr./day *30 days/mo. = 21.6 kWh. I pay about $.25/kWh, so $5.40.

qaz , (edited )

~25W which consists of:

  • Mini PC
    • Lenovo Thinkcentre M700 Tiny
    • i5-6500T
    • 8GB DDR4
    • 500GB SSD
  • External USB 3.5" enclosure
    • 2 x 2 TB HDD
  • Network switch
    • 4 Ports Gigabit

I've been thinking about upgrading because the CPU isn't that fast, the RAM ain't that much and I want to add a few more HDD's.
I've seen a pretty interesting Lenovo P520 with 64GB RAM a CPU that's 3x times as fast and room for 6 HDD's for €350, but the power consumption I can see online (80W) isn't that appealing with European electricity prices.

verstra OP ,

Ok, so most of you also use normal PC processors for your setups. So my power usage is not that high in comparison.

But still, a RaspberryPI would use much less and would still be performant enough.

tburkhol ,

5W vs 50W is an annual difference of 400 kWh. Or 150 kG CO2e, if that's your metric. Either way, it's not a huge cost for most people capable of running a 24/7 home lab.

If you start thinking about the costs - either cash or ghg - of creating an RPi or other dedicated low power server; the energy to run HDDs, at 5-10W each, or other accessories, well, the picture gets pretty complicated. Power is one aspect, and it's really easy to measure objectively, but that also makes it easy to fetishize.

Bizarroland ,

At $0.13/kwh 100 watts 24/7/365 will cost you $113.88 a year, or roughly $10 a month. Little things add up.

tburkhol ,

$10/month is one drink in the pub on one Friday night out of four. It's not even a movie ticket.

European electricity rates are closer to $0.30, and I agree that 100W 24/7 is a cost worth being aware of. I think we're seeing in this thread that it's pretty easy to find a system with standard PC parts from the past decade that idles in the 50W range, like OP, even with a couple of HDDs, and $50/year (US), even $150/year (EU), electricity cost to keep an old desktop out of a landfill maybe doesn't seem so bad.

I mean, one should think hard whether their home lab really needs a second full system running for failover, or whether they really need a separate desktop-based system just for NAS. And maybe don't convert your old gaming rig and its GPU to a home server. Or the quad-Xeon server that work is 'just giving away,' even if it would be cool to have a $50,000 computer running in the basement.

ironhydroxide ,

~600W.
2 machines:
Dell 730 8 disks running multiple Minecraft servers.
Supermicro 16 disks in raid 10 running multiple VM for various functions.
All on a 6kva ups (overkill I know)

Luckily I have a large solar array.

navi ,

My R710 is begging to be replaced.

kylian0087 ,

About 500W. 1 self build server 1 Dell R510 and one dell R710.
This also includes a bit of network gear like a 48 port switch.

rambos ,

35W

DIY PC with 2 SSD and 1 HDD (it used to be 22W with 3 SSDs and no HDD)

Hosting arr stack, nextcloud, immich and many more (~40 services in total)

Strit ,
@Strit@lemmy.linuxuserspace.show avatar

Mine is around 10W average.

It runs:

  • Websites
  • my blog
  • Jellyfin
  • Home assistant
  • Nextcloud

And a few other things.

ikidd ,
@ikidd@lemmy.world avatar

Probably about a kilowatt.

Atemu ,
@Atemu@lemmy.ml avatar

I use an Intel SBC with 10W TDP CPU in it. With a HDD and after PSU inefficiency, it draws about 10-20W depending on the load.

BearOfaTime ,

That's impressive.

What do you use the system for? And services like PiHole or media server?

Atemu ,
@Atemu@lemmy.ml avatar

That’s impressive.

Yeah, you really don't need a lot of CPU power for selfhosting.

It's a J4105, forgot to mention that.

What do you use the system for? And services like PiHole or media server?

Oh, sorry, forgot to add that bit.

It's mainly a NAS housing my git-annex repos that I access via SSH.

I also host a few HTTP services on it:

https://github.com/Atemu/nixos-config/blob/ee2d85dc3665ae3cad463a3eb132f806651fe436/configs/SOTERIA/default.nix#L57-L75

The services I use most here are Paperless and Piped.

Mealie will be added to that list as soon as the upstream PR lands which might be later this evening.

My Immich module is almost ready to go but the Immich app has a major bug preventing me from using it properly, so that's on hold for now.

I do want to set up Jellyfin in the not too distant future. The machine should handle that just fine with its iGPU as Intel's Quicksync is quite good and I probably won't even need transcoding for most cases either.

I probably won't be able to get around setting up Nextcloud for much longer. I haven't looked into it much but I already know it's a beast. What I primarily want from it is calendar and contact synchronisation but I'd also like to have the ability to share files or documents with mere mortals such as my SO or family.
The NixOS module hopefully abstracts away most of the complexity here but still...

BearOfaTime ,

Makes sense that basic file hosting shouldn't use much power.

Sharing stuff with friends and family is in my plan, eventually, not sure what approach to take yet, but I'd like to avoid an app for them, if I can (people are resistant to apps, I kind of get it).

I've looked at Nextcloud/Owncloud a few times, and it always seems like a lot more than I need, though I also want to move my calendar, contacts, etc, to my own hosting. Not sure what the right answer is, lol.

Atemu ,
@Atemu@lemmy.ml avatar

My setup already goes quite a bit beyond basic file hosting.

There is no self hosted service I could imagine to need that I'd expect not to be able to host due to CPU constraints. I think I'll run into RAM constraints first; it's already at 3GiB after boot.

dontwakethetrees ,
@dontwakethetrees@lemmy.world avatar

Don’t have anything spectacular performance wise but my late 2012 i7 Mac Mini Server is reporting ~14w (with my services running and downloads happening) and I saw bursts up to 30w. Not too bad for 12yo Mac running Homebridge, 2 Navidrome instances, Jellyfin, nginx, Transmission, and SMB (looking into Nextcloud to replace that).

mlaga97 ,

~120W with an old server motherboard and 6 spinning drives (42TB of storage overall).

Currently running Nextcloud, Home Assistant, Gitea, Matrix, Jellyfin, Lemmy, Mastodon, Vaultwarden, and a bunch of other smaller stuff alongside storing a few months worth of surveillance footage, so ~$12/month in power certainly ain't a bad deal versus paying for hosted versions of even a fraction of those services.

mlaga97 ,

I have looked at the ROI for getting more efficient kit and ended up discovering that going for something like a low-idle-power-draw system like a NUC or thin client and a disk enclosure has a return period on the order of multiple years.

Based on that information, I've instead put that money towards lower hanging fruit in the form of upgrading older inefficient appliances and adding multi-zone temperature control for power savings.

The energy savings I've been able to make based on long-term energy use data collected via Home Assistant has more than offset all of the electricity I've ever used to power the system itself.

lemann ,

About 150w total, trying to bring it down since electricity here is pretty expensive.

4 machines: two 4th gen i5, one 6th gen Nuc (Have two more but not set them up yet), and one HP thin client. Also two UPSes, and 3 cameras (previously four, but one was accidentally damaged).

Hosting Home Assistant, Zabbix, Palworld, SMB, Transmission, Plex and a bunch of other misc stuff.

Kind of contemplating moving everything to a 10th gen Nuc, but thinking a Ryzen based mini pc might be a better option

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