Currently I run a small blog site from a Raspberry Pi that gets about 13,000 hits per month. The problem is that it takes the Pi 97% CPU usages for about 6 seconds to process one hit! The browser has to wait that long after every click. My other concern is the Pi barely has enough RAM to run mysql. The mysql process uses 320MB of RAM which with other things is leaving the Pi with only 49MB of free memory. It’s using that much and the blog is brand new and almost empty.
I’m researching some server hardware that would perform much better but not use much power. I’m looking for low power, low noise, but decent performance. The blog must be hosted from home because that’s what it’s all about. I'm in no rush to build this rig, I'm only researching at this stage.
First off does anyone know of a dust proof or dust resistant case? Preferably with one big slow fan that won’t make much noise. Also can you get fan less CPU coolers for Xeon CPUs?
I’m going to attempt to work out how much power a basic home server might use at idle.
20 Watts - XEON E3-1220V3 (@idle)
5.6 Watts – 2x 4GB RAM
3 Watts - CPU fan (@idle)
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28.6 Watts but the motherboard is 90% efficient so:
31.8 Watts
8 Watts - 1TB Seagate Constellation ST1000NM0033 OR Essentially 0 Watts for SSD
3 Watts - Case fan (@idle)
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42.8 Watts with HDD OR 34.8 Watts with SSD
RM450 PSU is 88% efficient at <20% load
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48.6 Watts with HDD OR 39.5 Watts with SSD
Assume $0.26c/kW Hour & 31 days a month
$9.40 /month with HDD OR $7.64 /month with SSD
Does this sound about right? Any ideas on how to reduce the consumption?