Upcoming downtime to reduce power consumption

Post by **Steve Sokolowski** » Sun May 15, 2022 1:32 pm

As part of our continuing cost-cutting initiatives in this bear market, we'll be restarting servers this week.

We found that Debian 11 significantly reduces power consumption compared to Debian 10, because it is based on a new version of the Linux kernel. Newer versions of Linux include Intel-specific drivers to handle chip clock speeds and power consumption at idle, while previous versions of Linux provided a generic driver. By upgrading the hypervisors of our servers to Debian 11, we can reduce power consumption to 1/3 of what it used to be, saving $1,000 per year in electricity usage.

The coin servers are already running the latest version, which is how Chris discovered the savings. Chris will be restarting the database server tomorrow afternoon, during which time all services except for mining and the forums are expected to be offline. Sarah will notify customers when the restart is about to occur.

Other hypervisors will be restarted later in the week to complete the process, and Sarah will notify customers then.