S3 Standby State Done Right

For Earth Day, Cameron Butterfield has written in with a pointer to his article on how to get your Windows PC into S3 sleep, and why you want to. It covers the question of how to take advantage of this extremely low-power mode even when your machine is an "always on" file server, remote desktop, or VNC server.

Comments

And Linux?

[Ed Avis]

Great for Windows users... but what are the options to set up a Linux system to reduce power usage and fan noise when idle?

network broadcast traffic

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely enabling your PC to wake up whenever any network traffic is sensed is stupid in the example described in the article.

Will it not wake up whenever any workgroup broadcasts are sent to it?

Re:want a "file transfer" powerdown mode.

[evilviper]

i'd like to have a low power transfer mode, where the cpu is reduced (to 1 core at say 500 mhz),

Thanks to AMD's CnQ, and Intel later following suit, any CPU made in at least the past year (and more for AMD64 CPUs), will idle down to low power states automatically.

the monitor is turned off,

Also easy. You can hit the power button on the monitor, you can wait for it to automatically shut off after 15-20 minutes, or with X11, you can run xset and tell the video card o shut-off the monitor.

and as much memory as possible is dedicated to the apps which are doing intensive file reads/writes. this will allow the hard drives to be used less by caching the files in ram and pulsing the hard disk.

That one is not done, and is not really reasonably possible to do, nor helpful (on desktops) if it was done.

You need to write to the disk every few seconds, to maintain a consistent state, with or without a journaling file system. Your (desktop) HDD can't be spun-down in such a case, as spinning it up, over and over, would use more power than leaving it on, not to mention wear and tear... And since it's still spinning, even if you cached 1GB to RAM, flushing that to disk would use just as much power as writing it to the disk directly, a byte at a time.

Par for the couse. M$ booby trap.

[twitter]

Windows XP will often times not give s3 suspend as an option even when turned on in BIOS. But with Microsofts dumppo.exe utility you can

How typical, a DOS only power tool to manipulate your hardware and everyone else is out of luck. Yeah, that stinks. Thanks, Bill.

Re:want a "file transfer" powerdown mode.

[evilviper]

you should never end up with a corrupted filesystem.

Hate to tell you, but that's exactly what happens. You can't guaranty file system consistency when doing out-of-order writes. That's among the main reasons Ext3 does a full "fsync" every 6 seconds. It's a serious limitation of Ext2 in it's default mode. You're simply playing Russian Roulette with your data, and eventually you'll lose.

You certainly don't have to take my word for it. It's a well known issue, and there are several write-ups of it.

Re:Calculations are a bit off

[Michael Woodhams]

There is a problem that nobody seems to be interested in producing good low capacity PSUs. If you want (say) 80% efficiency and modular cabling, most manufacturers don't have anything below 500W. (A few have 400W.)

Some good options now are Seasonic S12, Antec NeoHE, Silverstone ST30NF, Nexus NX-80x0 series.

Re:Encore

[Achromatic1978]

Generally people don't bother to refute the content of his posts because it's pointless. He'll argue until he's blue in the face - or you provide a coherent and logical response to him. He has no rebuttal for that. Far easier for him to go on to the "Evil Micro$oft WinDoze!" troll.