Our Linux Benchmarking Power Use Still Around 3,000 kWh A Month

Besides getting a number of stitches to my foot this weekend in the hospital, equally as painful was receiving the latest electric bill for our mass open-source / Linux benchmarking efforts. The power use over the past month was the second highest electrical use of the year.

It's just a matter of getting used to that all of the Linux benchmarking that goes on here leads to around burning ~3000 kWh a month due to the dozens of systems carrying out a variety of performance tests on a daily basis.

The bill this month reported power use of 2932 kWh over the past 31 days, which is up from the month prior of 2774 kWh while down from 3449 kWh as the high this summer. The power use would have been over 3k kWh this month, but it was down since a few test systems have run into disk/file-system issues and another one or two other hardware problems, which I haven't had the time/replacement-hardware yet to correct.

Of course, this message is a reminder to Phoronix readers about the great deal of expenses (with the high electrical costs just being a small portion of the overall operating expenses) and time (~100 hour work weeks for myself and even trying to get work done this weekend while in pain) when you're deciding whether or not to use AdBlock/NoScript on Phoronix or whether you should subscribe to Phoronix Premium or make a PayPal tip. There's around ~30%+ of visitors using AdBlock while less than 1% of the Phoronix readership subscribes to Phoronix Premium or offers tips. Thank you to those who do decide to support this work as the leading source for Linux hardware reviews/benchmarks and other enthusiast/gaming-oriented Linux news.