Save server power usage

My production Proxmox-server is never really running on idle. Frigate Video Surveillance and Home Assistant is pretty much keeping the server at around 8-10% CPU usage. 24 hours average power consumption has been around 50-54 Watts.

A few factors that prevents the server from entering full “idle-state”:

• Recording of surveillance-video from 5 IP-cameras.
• AI object detection using an m.2 Google Coral TPU.
• Z-Wave and Zigbee USB-controllers collecting e.g. power-consumption data from smart-plugs.
• DVB USB-receiver collecting data from 433 mHz devices like thermometers.
• Zigbee to MQTT server, and an MQTT-broker.

If I stop the above-mentioned services my server consumes 23-25 Watts. It’s an Intel 16 Core i9-9900 CPU @ 3.10GHz with 64Gb memory, 1 MVMe-drive (Proxmox boot-drive), 1 classical SSD (VMs and LXC-containers) and 1 HDD-drive (Surveillance-videos, NFS and SMB shares).

To reduce power consumption I installed an utility called Powertop. This is what I did:

apt-get install -y powertop
powertop --auto-tune
nano /etc/systemd/system/powertop.service

powertop.service:

[Unit]
Description=Powertop auto-tune on boot

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/powertop --auto-tune
RemainAfterExit=true

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable powertop.service

After setting this up, 24 hours average power consumption has been around 46-48 Watts.