MiserWare

Alan Lord Testimonial

Linux users save energy

Alan Lord co-founded The Open Learning Centre in 2006 with Alan Bell. Based near London, their business is all about helping organizations benefit from open source software. They provide clients with various services from consulting, to training and support services. Alan Lord also moonlights as The Opensourcerer, a blogger devoted to spreading the word about the benefits of open source software. Like many in Europe and across the world, Alan is sensitive to the electricity costs of the servers he runs at home and the battery life of the laptop he uses daily. Below is a recent blog posting by Alan, reposted with his permission, regarding his beta testing of MiserWare's MicroMiser software.

“Over 65% Power Reduction on my Ubuntu Server! Wow!

I started using the Beta MicroMiser software this morning. I have installed it on the following interesting computers at my home. (They all run Ubuntu. The server is on 8.10 Server edition the others are on 9.04 desktop all 32bit):

Lobsang - Desktop PC Intel Core2 8400
Angua - Laptop PC Intel Core2 Mobile T5500
Vimes - Home Server VIA C7

I checked with MiserWare that they were OK for me to report some of the stats and they said it was OK. So, if you run the daemon on your machines, look in /var/log/syslog for lines like the following.

Lobsang reports about once per hour with:

• May 13 17:09:32 Lobsang micromiser[7571]: Estimated energy saved since MicroMiser start: 0.100145kWh (20.70%)
• May 13 18:09:32 Lobsang micromiser[7571]: Estimated energy saved since MicroMiser start: 0.104223kWh (19.07%)

which is not bad. It’s a fairly hungry processor so ~20% saving is certainly not to be sniffed at.

Angua reports:

• May 13 19:05:51 Angua micromiser[2496]: Estimated energy saved since MicroMiser start: 0.000124kWh (33.9%)

Which is even better percentage-wise and means my battery should last a bit longer when I am out and about.

And finally Vimes, my server that is on 24/7 reports:

• May 13 17:12:35 vimes micromiser[14718]: Estimated energy saved since MicroMiser start: 0.315464kWh (65.19%)
• May 13 18:12:35 vimes micromiser[14718]: Estimated energy saved since MicroMiser start: 0.356811kWh (65.26%)

Which is pretty astonishing frankly. Now these figures are for just the processor but even so, that VIA C7 is described as drawing about 7W under normal load. If I have more than halved that over the lifetime of the device this will be not insignificant.

Really fascinating stuff.”