Suspend, Hibernate, Shutdown, or Stay Running?

[eltuno]

I'm using solar panels + battery so I shut down my computer whenever I don't use it. Saving energy ...

Good idea but I suppose you need to have large batteries. And I don't know how sensible are your cells either. The weather is so bad these days I'm not sure they would produce enough...

Today weather was OK -- talking about the south-west of France.
And summer is on its way, it's getting better an better !

I use a single 100Ah battery for all my needs, ha ha. Yep, I'm living like a hobo and I like it

[entropyfoe]

Suspend to RAM.
For me it is the obvious choice.
Zero power at the wall, or so my meter says, there must be enough to keep the RAM alive, but disks and fans are off.
Yet, I hit a key, and the music starts playing in 4 seconds, and the desk-top is fully functioning in a total of 7 or 8 seconds.

Getting close to my dream of an instant on workstation.

As for hibernate, I always thought this was not supported or well supported in MX. So, I don't do that, and besidees it has to be slower, and writes to the SSD.

As for leave it on, no, unneeded wear on fans. And I think minor power glitches are sustained better in suspend, with the low current draw, a short dip and the caps stay charged, where at full power it will crash. I have tried this, where I unplugged a suspended system quickly and plugged it into a new surge suppressor. It never noticed.

Any way, I am very happy with the stability of MX with the kernel fix, over 79 days up time, no crash or lockups. I use suspend many hours a day when not using the machine, so low power use for a powerful machine.

Code: Select all

$ inxi -F
System:    Host: Ryzen Kernel: 4.15.5-antix.1-amd64-smp x86_64 bits: 64 Desktop: Xfce 4.12.3 
           Distro: MX-17.1_x64 Horizon December 10, 2017 
Machine:   Type: Desktop Mobo: ASUSTeK model: PRIME X370-PRO v: Rev X.0x serial: N/A 
           UEFI [Legacy]: American Megatrends v: 1201 date: 10/18/2017 
CPU:       Topology: 6-Core model: AMD Ryzen 5 1600X bits: 64 type: MT MCP L2 cache: 3072 KiB 
           Speed: 3654 MHz min/max: 2200/3600 MHz Core speeds (MHz): 1: 1898 2: 1882 3: 3804 
           4: 3675 5: 1881 6: 1877 7: 1958 8: 2048 9: 1840 10: 1841 11: 1846 12: 1841 
Graphics:  Card-1: NVIDIA GK208 [GeForce GT 710B] driver: nvidia v: 384.111 
           Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.19.2 driver: nvidia resolution: 1920x1080~60Hz 
           OpenGL: renderer: GeForce GT 710/PCIe/SSE2 v: 4.5.0 NVIDIA 384.111 
Audio:     Card-1: NVIDIA GK208 HDMI/DP Audio driver: snd_hda_intel 
           Card-2: AMD driver: snd_hda_intel 
           Sound Server: ALSA v: k4.15.5-antix.1-amd64-smp 
Network:   Card-1: Intel I211 Gigabit Network Connection driver: igb 
           IF: eth0 state: up speed: 100 Mbps duplex
Drives:    HDD Total Size: 1.14 TiB used: 463.20 GiB (39.8%) 
           ID-1: /dev/nvme0n1 vendor: Samsung model: SSD 960 EVO 250GB size: 232.89 GiB 
           ID-2: /dev/sda vendor: Samsung model: SSD 850 EVO 1TB size: 931.51 GiB 
Partition: ID-1: / size: 38.20 GiB used: 7.75 GiB (20.3%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/nvme0n1p1 
           ID-2: /home size: 72.55 GiB used: 146.8 MiB (0.2%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/nvme0n1p3 
           ID-3: swap-1 size: 16.60 GiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%) fs: swap dev: /dev/nvme0n1p2 
Sensors:   System Temperatures: cpu: 29.1 C mobo: N/A gpu: nvidia temp: 33 C 
           Fan Speeds (RPM): cpu: 0 gpu: nvidia fan: 50% 
Info:      Processes: 383 Uptime: 79d 7h 11m Memory: 15.66 GiB used: 4.13 GiB (26.4%) 
           Shell: bash inxi: 3.0.08 

[KBD]

entropyfoe, good points about the wear on the fans and about power surges. It's awesome that you have had so many up days on MX.
I think I'm going to stick with suspend for the machines I use daily, with an occasional hibernate when I'm away from my main machine for a day or so. I have installed debian-goodies to tell me when a kernal restart or other restart is recommended. I think I've probably been shutting down and restarting more than necessary, and I have concerns that can be too much wear and tear on older machines and not necessary for computers in daily use. My server is a sort of small/mini desktop and I use it weeks at a time with probably not a big power draw. I believe in saving energy, being frugal, but also mix in some common sense and consider each situation and what a person's goals or use case may be.

[Gordon Cooper]

Have lost count of the number of discussions (arguments) I have had about the merits of leaving computers running 24/7. Back in the days of DOS some users thought it best to leave hard drives running all the time, because of a belief that they were more likely to fail at restart time. Others thought about the wear on bearings and would even shut down is the machine was not required for an hour. Another school of thought was concerned about increasing the fire risk and switched off if the PC was to be unattended. These differing opinions still exist, as is obvious in this thread. Going back to the time when my job involved maintaining equipment full of thermionic valves (tubes in USA) it was very obvious that the gear left running all the time had a much lower failure rate. OT I know, but the same rule can apply to diesels. Kermadec Island weather station now runs on solar power but in the 1950's all our power came from diesel generators. First year I was there, the mechanic believed in splitting the task between two machines, one for daytime and a smaller plant st night. This meant cold starts everyday, one of them broke a crankshaft. The following year, new mechanic with different ideas. The windows of the generator house were boarded up with the diesels running really hot. Water just about on the boil, which meant regular top-ups of the cooling system, but fuel consumption went down to about ten gallons a day, the exhaust was just a heat haze. We shut down after three months for an oil change and for me to check brushes on the exciter, took a cylinder head off to check for wear, there was no visible coke, micrometer tests on the bore showed nothing worth worrying about, so we fired it up again for another three months. Didn't have a suspend mode.

On the subject of solar, I inherited a set of two volt sealed lead acid cells, enough to make a 12 volt emergency supply. They are now about 16 years old. The original rating
was 450AH. I checked them two years ago, still supplying 12 volts after 36 hours at a 10 amp discharge rate. Did not run them right down. Charging is not much more
than trickle from a small solar panel, but I did build a charge regulator to limit maximum V to 14.4, which is the makers recommendation

[Eadwine Rose]

So that is why those course laptops I could use were so darned fast on startup and shutdown.

SSD's also make the Chromebooks fast. The one Chromebook I still own and converted to a Linux machine only has 2gb ram but is still my fastest booting machine when it is powered off. Pretty much any computer with an SSD will be faster, but I like the larger SATA drives in general for all the storage.

It wasn't a chromebook by the way, something asus, but indeed the guy said the things had SSDs for hard drives.

[sdibaja]

Myself, being in a humid environment 25 meters from the surf, I figure the warmth helps keep the the corrosion problems down.
I have 5 computers local, all working on syncing and backups 24/7. Necessary evil.
Last year a bought a eBay HP z620 with dual Xenon CPUs. It is hungry. About 5 o6 KW per day... running me up on the edge of the gross consumer electricity rates. I put it on auto suspend, just a tiny bit of warmth. Better I think.

Solar would be great, but the ROI is not quite there yet considering the local costs.

[cyrilus31]

A Windows comparison but for what it is worth.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/169941/ ... _Mode.html

If I may, I would say this is quite "old" an article. With SSD democratization, startup takes only a few seconds. And even if it takes 1 minute. WOW! is it so "painfully slow" as it's stated? Is our time so precious that saving 30-40 seconds a day is fundamental? I wonder.
Don't know how it is in the US but in Europe, in average, electricity prices increased by 40% the last 10 years and it seems to be a longterm trend. That will be an argument in a near future.
And finally "What does that different of 4 watts mean to you" : for people worried about energy it means a lot, particularly if you multiply by the millions of people (billions?) doing the same way. Anyway...
The only drawback of shutting off a computer I could think of would be the longevity of components (capacitor...). But even now they are more reliable and I shut down my computer every day for many years with no issue. Heat is the main enemy so I make sure that my computers are well ventilated.

Today weather was OK -- talking about the south-west of France.
And summer is on its way, it's getting better an better !
I use a single 100Ah battery for all my needs, ha ha. Yep, I'm living like a hobo and I like it

Nous sommes voisins alors, je suis du côté de Toulouse. Tu pourrais me donner les références de ton matériel, ça pourrait m'intéresser