The Power Usage Of A 50+ Linux System Benchmarking Farm

The power use of our open-source, Linux benchmarking test farm is on the rise, especially over the summer months.

For those following the progress on the basement conversion into a Linux server room use for the LinuxBenchmarking.com server farm that's tracking the progress on the mainline Linux kernel, GCC, LLVM Clang, and other projects on a daily basis, here's the latest numbers.

While I've added extra ventilation to the basement server room, with summer coming about and needing to run the air conditioner frequently, the electrical costs are only adding up on top of the 50+ systems. For the trailing 30 days, the power usage has spiked substantially with warm weather and adding more systems.

My latest electrical bill, a few months after the basement conversion into the server room and the warm weather.

The electrical use is hitting a massive high for the year. The increased electrical use attributed to the server room devoted to LinuxBenchmarking.com, which is ad-free, is now about $300 USD per month. This is while the server room temperature generally hovers 75~82°F any time of the day.

While LinuxBenchmarking.com will reveal its true value in due time when all of these systems have had more time to conduct their daily open-source benchmarks, I just want to remind readers that if they suppor their work on this (and Phoronix itself) to please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium, making a PayPal tip, and/or following Phoronix on Facebook and Twitter. It's a massive operation especially when it rests mostly just on my shoulders. Thanks for your support over the past eleven years.