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Hello there!
I'm running a minecraft server on an old Toshiba Satellite L750-1MX laptop. It's a bare bones arch installation, only what's required for the server to run, no DE/WM, just a bare terminal.
I wanted to calculate the average monthly cost of running the server 24/7, so I endeavored to find out how much power it's using.
First idea was to write a program that calculates power consumption by reading voltage_now and current_now files from the /sys/class/power_supply_BAT*/ directory.
This gave readings of somewhere between 12W and 25W while the laptop was charging, and settled around 2.5W once the battery charged fully, all with the server running.
This seemed a bit dubious, so I installed powerstat, and ran it with the -R flag, which uses the RAPL interface to calculate power consumption.
This returned a reading of around 8W, while the script reading the battery information on another tty read 2.5W at the same time.
This is all well and good, but when looking up the average power consumption of a laptop, the estimates I find online are around 65W.
So, my questions are:
1) am I doing something wrong?
2) why is there a disparity between the direct battery readings and powerstat?
3) should i unplug the cable and just run the server on battery for some time to get better estimates?
4) is there a better (software based) way of getting power readings?
5) is it possible that a bare arch install on an old laptop legitimately runs at around 10W?
I'm not expecting all of these to get answered necessarily, and please feel free to give general input.
If this is not the appropriate forum for this question, I apologize.
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