Our Dozens Of Linux Benchmark Systems Still Burning Around 3000 kWh A Month

After writing last month about The Insane Power Use Of Benchmarking Linux Every Day as part of looking at the electrical use of our Linux benchmarking farm powering Phoronix, LinuxBenchmarking.com, etc. Here's this month's numbers.

In July the energy bill clocked in 3449 kWh of energy use! Yes, well more than three times the energy consumption of an average US home, all thanks to the amount of benchmarking that's being done on a daily basis via the Phoronix Test Suite and controlled with system WoL and power-offs, result collection, etc, via our open-source Phoromatic component. This month at least, the electrical bill is a bit less... There's only 2774 kWh charged, a nice drop compared to the 3449 kWh a month prior. It's still though hundreds of dollars per month in electricity.

Energy use has gone up significantly since launching the ad-free LinuxBenchmarking.com performance trackers -- even though Phoromatic takes care of managing systems to power them on/off depending upon testing needs, etc -- and expanding the development of the GPLv3 Phoronix Test Suite and Phoromatic.

The drop is due to only having 29 days this billing cycle rather than 33 days the previous bill and increasing the air temperature by 3~5 degrees to utilize less air conditioning. However, there's still 50+ systems running open-source Linux benchmarks every day at Phoronix, which via LinuxBenchmarking.com there are more than 250,000 benchmark results in monitoring the performance of the daily Git code for the Linux kernel, GCC, LLVM / Clang, and Mesa+DRM.

With LinuxBenchmarking.com being ad-free, I'm still actively developing the open-source Phoronix Test Suite and Phoromatic on GitHub, and many Phoronix.com readers blocking ads, it's time for the usual public service announcement... If you appreciate all of the Linux hardware testing done at Phoronix that you really can't find anywhere else along with our frequent kernel and driver benchmarks, file-system tests, etc, please very much consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium or donating via PayPal or considering other ways to help support the work done exclusively at Phoronix. If you are helping out, don't forget to also suggest what Linux Skylake benchmarks you'd like to see in the next few days. Thanks for your support.