HP T5740 Thin Client - Throughput question
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Thanks P3R, I finally caught up on some of that reading. It appears my current hardware does support the AES-NI, so at least I know what I have will suffice for at least a little longer.
For anyone interested I purchased a few older Dell Optiplex machines…used off business lease a few years back for cheap. I used a couple for pfSense, and they've been great. They've ran for a few years without issue, just one power supply failure...easily replaced and not working again
The CPU I have in them is as follows copied and pasted from dashboard:
CPU Type Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E8500 @ 3.16GHz
2 CPUs: 1 package(s) x 2 core(s)I guess I'll just stick with my current hardware for a little longer.
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Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E8500 @ 3.16GHz
Wow, that chip is from Q1-2008 and burns some 65Watts. And you post about jet-engine noise from switch fans? ;)
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If you replace that E8500 box with something newer that has AES-NI, and pfSense support, you will probably break even on the energy bill alone by the end of a year
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As stated by Intel:
Thermal Design Power (TDP) represents the average power, in watts, the processor dissipates when operating at Base Frequency with all cores active under an Intel-defined, high-complexity workload.I was very careful with selecting low TDPs, 10 and 17 W (and payed a premium to get them), but my CPUs are normally never even close to base frequency so I tend to think that I could have gone with normal CPUs and shouldn't have been so afraid of high TDPs. After all it's the power actually consumed that's interesting not the CPU TDP.
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@johnkeates:
If you replace that E8500 box with something newer that has AES-NI, and pfSense support, you will probably break even on the energy bill alone by the end of a year
Not a chance.
The CPU's are almost certainly near idle in his application 99.9% of the time. 65W TDP does not mean the CPU draws 65W of power, it dissipates up to 65W worth of heat. Not a power consumption figure, although a decent enough ballpark scale for relative comparison to other intel CPU's.
Real world use, he probably averages ~35W from the wall with that if he's using a HDD. If he replaces the HDD with a SSD, or a pair of thumb drives in 2.4.0 ZFS install he would probably lose ~7-10W at the wall. Replacing the CPU with a modern SoC, probably lose another 8-10W at the most. Most of those savings would come by eliminating fans, the CPU's really aren't doing much work in these applications.
Putting those figures into $$$ - In the CONUS Alaska unsurprisingly has the highest average $/KwH @ ~$0.21 (most of the US is about half that). But going off the highest average cost in the CONUS that comes out to about $18.40/yr per 10W in a 24/7/365 device.
A J3355B is a very cheap & modern SoC @ $55. Assuming he only had to buy that (which is very unlikely as he would likely have to purchase new RAM at a minimum) it would take him about 3 years to pay back the cost of a new CPU with his electricity bill - if he lives in Alaska. In many states it would be 6 years or more.
The cost of energy usage is often greatly magnified with pfSense since it's a 24/7 device. It should certainly be a consideration, but it simply isn't as critical as it is made out to be. If you are running a business that uses a great many of these devices then it becomes much more important. But for home users the math generally suggests you should reuse old hardware or buy something old and cheap off eBay rather than spend significantly more on power efficient hardware.
If you want to save $ today with your electricity bill, then dig out two old thumbdrives from your drawers (or buy some cheap USB 2.0 drives for ~$4/ea), save your config file, reinstall pfSense 2.4.0 BETA (it won't be BETA for much longer) on ZFS to the thumb drives and save 7-10W of electricity by unplugging that HDD.
That translates to ~$12.80/yr in AK or ~$6.40/yr in most of the US for 7W of savings. Most of us probably have 2 thumbdrives in a drawer somewhere.
Even if you do though you aren't exactly saving the big $$'s -
I don't live in the USA so I don't know about power usage and cost over there, and I don't know about E8400 idle power usage either. I do know that a E4400 (which used to be in my portable ITX pfSense box for demonstrations) with a laptop HDD and a dual intel NIC, with 4GB DDR2 RAM, will take about 40W in BIOS Idle. pfSense bootup is about 65W, pfSense booted and idle is 46.8W. That's with no special packages installed. From my local tariff, that translates to about 120 USD per year. Sure, that's not the price of a new box, but if you are going to invest in a replacement (as per this topic), taking the saved cost from a inefficient CPU and adding it on top of what you were willing to spend in the first place gets you a better system for the same price and savings after the first year.
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Well then you're paying about $0.30/KwH - very high and not representative of your average household.
I would also suspect there is something wrong with your system, most likely your power supply or fans.
My box uses an i5-2400, with a desktop HDD & a quad port NIC, 2x4GB DDR3it pulled 41W from the wall. Under load (lots of VPN usage & packages) it would go up to ~10% CPU, the wattage would maybe change 1 or 2W, but pretty much only if the fans picked up pace.
The i5-2400 is a 95W part that's not much newer than what you're using. I did unplug all unnecessary components such as optical drives, but that shouldn't make much difference.
All of my parts should be more power hungry than yours, and my system was working harder but you're somehow pulling more power. Maybe the difference of architecture but I very much doubt it. Something was probably wrong.I have it on USB install now and it pulls an almost constant 34W from the wall without the HDD.
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Well then you're paying about $0.30/KwH - very high and not representative of your average household.
I would also suspect there is something wrong with your system, most likely your power supply or fans.
My box uses an i5-2400, with a desktop HDD & a quad port NIC, 2x4GB DDR3it pulled 41W from the wall. Under load (lots of VPN usage & packages) it would go up to ~10% CPU, the wattage would maybe change 1 or 2W, but pretty much only if the fans picked up pace.
The i5-2400 is a 95W part that's not much newer than what you're using. I did unplug all unnecessary components such as optical drives, but that shouldn't make much difference.
All of my parts should be more power hungry than yours, and my system was working harder but you're somehow pulling more power. Maybe the difference of architecture but I very much doubt it. Something was probably wrong.I have it on USB install now and it pulls an almost constant 34W from the wall without the HDD.
That's why I suggested something newer. While C2D era Intel CPU's are much better when compared to Pentium 4 era CPU's, the i-series 2nd generation are way better than the C2D series. The i-series 6th gen is better than the 2nd gen by 20% in terms of power consumption.
Another unit i've been measuring on recently is a qotom box with a i3-4005U, 8GB RAM, an mSATA SSD and 4 Intel GbE interfaces. It runs less than 12W during idle and about 19W during load, which is with OpenVPN, UniFi Controller, Captive Portal and multiple VLANs (with software tagging) on a 1G WAN link with about 40 clients.
Comparing those two, and the cost (about 230 for the qotom box), you get:
- a more capable CPU than any Core2Duo
- less power consumption
- less heat (it's passively cooled!)
and in my country:
- save about 50% electricity and use that money to upgrade your box
- start saving on power after the 1st year
This is why I posted: don't use that E8xxx CPU. You simply can't put a system together that is efficient in any way, unless electricity is free. Maybe in the USA electricity is super cheap, but in the rest of the world it may not be.
According to this: http://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/hp/t5740/ the thin client from <2005 uses about as much power as the i3 system. hah!
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Yeah, if you live in a part of the world with exceptionally high power costs then by all means focus on efficiency.
If you live in the Land of The Free then buying that $230 qotom box will take most people something like 7+ years to pay off in electricity if you're upgrading from the old power hog you already have. It would take about 4 years to pay off the difference between buying it and a $100 eBay special.
There are always exceptions to the rule, but I'd say that spending significantly more for energy efficient parts is only valid for home users in fringe cases.
That's not to say I don't support low power consumption!
If you're building new or replacing broken parts then I'd strongly recommend the cheap route to low power (if you have nothing you can reuse). I'm not suggesting any specific eBay parts I'm linking, they're only examples.
Buy a used SFF chassis w/ power supply - nothing else needs to be working: ~$30
Alternatively, if you already have a case but no PSU and live in a high energy cost area, consider a pico-PSU 80 @ $35
Buy J3355B: ~$57 Buy some SO-DIMM DDR3: $~12
Buy a pair of USB 2.0 Flash Drives if you don't already have some: ~$10
If you have neither a dual port NIC or a switch that supports VLAN's you'll need a NIC!: ~$15So assuming you have absolutely nothing on hand you can reuse, that system will run at probably about 10W for ~$125. This is what I'd suggest for the OP if he ends up replacing his current hardware.
I've tested the J3355B at the following throughputs:
~300Mbps w/ OpenVPN AES-128
~60Mbps w/ OpenVPN AES-128 AND Suricata with a moderate rulesetObviously if you aren't using VPN heavily (routing most of your traffic through the VPN) it will do Gigabit easily.
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Just to put a number on it I would expect an Atom N280 to be capable of passing somewhere in the 350-400Mbps range with default firewall and NAT.
It's the right decision not to spend money on that at this point. Besides the previously mentioned lack of AES-NI (pfSense 2.5) it's a 32bit CPU which means it won't run pfSense 2.4. We will be supporting older versions for sometime after the newer releases but we expect 2.4 to be released relatively soon.
Steve