Old post detected!
This post is roughly 8 years old; originally published on December 16, 2015! The information presented here may be out of date and inaccurate.
Please read this page but do keep its age in mind.
I’ve installed Open Media Vault on a HP ProLiant MicroServer G7 N54L and use it as media server for the house. OpenMediaVault (OMV) is a network attached storage (NAS) solution based on Debian.
I want to minimise power consumption but maximise performance. Here are some tweaks reduce power consumption and improve network performance.
Power Saving
Install the following.
apt-get install amd64-microcode firmware-linux firmware-linux-free \
firmware-linux-nonfree pciutils powertop radeontool
And for ACPI.
apt-get install acpi acpid acpi-support acpi-support-base
ASPM and ACPI
First I enabled PCIE ASPM in the BIOS and forced the kernel to use it and
ACPI via grub by changing GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub,
so it looks like this:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet acpi=force pcie_aspm=force nmi_watchdog=0"
Then update grub and reboot.
update-grub
reboot
Enable Power Saving via udev
The following rules file /etc/udev/rules.d/90-local-n54l.rules enables
power saving modes for all PCI, SCSI and USB devices and ASPM. Futher
the internal Radeon card power profile is set to low as there is rarely
a monitor connected. The file contains the following:
SUBSYSTEM=="module", KERNEL=="pcie_aspm", ACTION=="add", TEST=="parameters/policy", ATTR{parameters/policy}="powersave"
SUBSYSTEM=="i2c", ACTION=="add", TEST=="power/control", ATTR{power/control}="auto"
SUBSYSTEM=="pci", ACTION=="add", TEST=="power/control", ATTR{power/control}="auto"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ACTION=="add", TEST=="power/control", ATTR{power/control}="auto"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ACTION=="add", TEST=="power/autosuspend", ATTR{power/autosuspend}="2"
SUBSYSTEM=="scsi", ACTION=="add", TEST=="power/control", ATTR{power/control}="auto"
SUBSYSTEM=="spi", ACTION=="add", TEST=="power/control", ATTR{power/control}="auto"
SUBSYSTEM=="drm", KERNEL=="card*", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="radeon", TEST=="power/control", TEST=="device/power_method", ATTR{device/power_method}="profile", ATTR{device/power_profile}="low"
SUBSYSTEM=="scsi_host", KERNEL=="host*", ACTION=="add", TEST=="link_power_management_policy", ATTR{link_power_management_policy}="min_power"
Add this to /erc/rc.local.
echo '1500' > '/proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs'
Hard disk spindown
Using the Open Media Vault web interface got to Storage -> Physical Disks,
select each disk in turn and click Edit then set:
- Advanced Power Management: Intermediate power usage with standby
- Automatic Acoustic Management: Minimum performance, Minimum acoustic output
- Spindown time: 20 minutes
Performance Tuning
Network
The following tweaks improve network performance ,but I have a HP NC360T PCI Express Dual Port Gigabit Server Adapter in my N54L so these settings may not be applicable to the onboard NIC.
Add this to /erc/rc.local.
ethtool -G eth0 rx 4096
ethtool -G eth1 rx 4096
ethtool -G eth0 tx 4096
ethtool -G eth1 tx 4096
ifconfig eth0 txqueuelen 1000
ifconfig eth1 txqueuelen 1000
Add the following to /etc/sysctl.d/local.conf.
fs.file-max = 100000
net.core.netdev_max_backlog = 50000
net.core.optmem_max = 40960
net.core.rmem_default = 16777216
net.core.rmem_max = 16777216
net.core.wmem_default = 16777216
net.core.wmem_max = 16777216
net.ipv4.conf.all.accept_redirects = 0
net.ipv4.conf.all.accept_source_route = 0
net.ipv4.conf.all.log_martians = 1
net.ipv4.conf.all.send_redirects = 0
net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 10000 65000
net.ipv4.tcp_fin_timeout = 10
net.ipv4.tcp_max_syn_backlog = 30000
net.ipv4.tcp_max_tw_buckets = 2000000
net.ipv4.tcp_rfc1337 = 1
net.ipv4.tcp_rmem = 4096 87380 16777216
net.ipv4.tcp_sack=0
net.ipv4.tcp_slow_start_after_idle = 0
net.ipv4.tcp_timestamps=0
net.ipv4.tcp_tw_reuse = 1
net.ipv4.tcp_wmem = 4096 65536 16777216
net.ipv4.udp_rmem_min = 8192
net.ipv4.udp_wmem_min = 8192
vm.swappiness = 10
Conclusion
With these settings applied powertop reports everything that can be in
a power saving mode is and the room temperature is measurably cooler.
More importantly, with four 4TB drives in a RAID-5 configuration
formatted with XFS and dual bonded gigabit ethernet, I am able to backup
data to the server at a sustained rate of 105MB/s, which is 0.85 Gbit.
Not too shabby for an AMD Turion II Neo N54L (2.2GHz) 🙂