Suspend vs. Shutdown

Primoz · 2009-05-02 18:33:57

First off: I searched for this and got nothing... (strange I thought it exsists).

I'm in dilemma which is better / healthier for my system.
I know that Linux is able to run without shutdown for months, but I have my computer in my bedroom and it's really loud so I can't leave it on.
So I shutdown every night before I go to sleep. But even though the boot is quite fast (not that fast as I'm lazy and only thing I did is that HAL and similar start in background (@)), I got fed up
with constant loging in and waiting that all KDE settings and apps that I want to start from get-go start.
I did tried suspend to RAM few times before, but the thing is that then i start with a lot of cache from last time I use it. Meaning I use ~700MB of RAM when I start using computer.
And even more I don't think that it's healthy to leave whole OS in RAM or disk.

And is it even possible to use suspend to disk with Ext4?

Is there any command to clear cache??

Oh and I have desktopcomputer not laptop which are more known for suspending "abilities".

So what do you do? Do you shutdown, suspend or just leave it running?
And what do you think I should use?

Last edited by Primoz (2009-05-02 18:42:46)

moljac024 · 2009-05-02 18:51:50

I have a laptop and I never suspend/hibernate or any of that crap....

Peasantoid · 2009-05-02 18:54:57

moljac024 wrote:

I have a laptop and I never suspend/hibernate or any of that crap....

Primoz wrote:

Oh and I have desktopcomputer not laptop which are more known for suspending "abilities".

moljac024 · 2009-05-02 18:57:14

Peasantoid wrote:

moljac024 wrote:
I have a laptop and I never suspend/hibernate or any of that crap....
Primoz wrote:
Oh and I have desktopcomputer not laptop which are more known for suspending "abilities".

The reason I said that: Suspend and hibernate are most useful for laptop computers, they're not needed as much for a desktop PC.
My point was that if I don't suspend my laptop, I sure as hell wouldn't suspend a desktop (which I don't).

Last edited by moljac024 (2009-05-02 18:57:40)

rwd · 2009-05-02 18:58:24

Why do you think it is 'unhealthy'? I have never read that suspending to ram/disk is bad practice. It is a very complicated process though with many factors that can cause it to fail. But the worst thing that can happen is losing your session and having to reboot.You can also optimize booting to grub easily in 12 seconds without recompiling the kernel, and boot straight into KDE without having to log in.

Peasantoid · 2009-05-02 18:58:52

Mhm.

Well, the OP says his computer is too loud to leave running, but he doesn't want to have to boot it up again every day. That leaves either suspend or hibernate... Personally, I'd just stick the damn thing in a closet.

Last edited by Peasantoid (2009-05-02 18:59:04)

Ramses de Norre · 2009-05-02 19:16:36

I suspend and hibernate my laptop all the time, that saves me a huge amount of time because I can continue working right from where I stopped in a few seconds. I can't imagine what is unhealthy about it.

About the cache: noooooo, don't clear your cache! The cache fills itself with the stuff linux expects you to be using in the near future, why destroy this nice mechanism of anticipating on what you do to speed up your system? Cache usage is a _good_ thing, memory usage by apps can be bad (memory leaks) but cache is never bad.

bender02 · 2009-05-02 19:35:56

1) I'd say the 'only' problem with hibernating is to get it working. Then I'd say there's no problem.
2) Don't worry about the cache. When you look at the memory usage (eg running "free"), the stuff in cache can be ignored, so look at the numbers (+/- buffers/cache), that's your actual memory usage.
3) Some kind of hibernate should work - there are a couple of options in the kernel (or as kernel patches), and some of them should work even without any acpi support, so pretty much also on any desktop machine.

graysky · 2009-05-02 19:44:48

Suspend is great. If you want it up in 10-15 sec, suspend it. If you don't care, shutdown. Hibernate is something I never figured out. My machine has 8 gigs of RAM; it takes much longer to write all that to swap and then read it back when the box powers up again. Even 4 gigs takes a while. Anyway, I don't think there's any reason not to use the suspend feature of your board.

Last edited by graysky (2009-05-02 19:50:37)

hatten · 2009-05-02 19:50:47

suspend ftw. I suspend every night.

vinegaroon · 2009-05-04 05:19:47

Yep suspend is great, I often suspend my netbook and it only takes a few seconds to start back up.

von_Wanderlust · 2009-05-04 13:58:41

Zivijo!

Sure, I know how this feels, I get this at work when waiting for Windows to start and set up. It's probably not the answer you are looking for, but for a non-technical solution, try changing your 'workflow' instead. I get to work, turn machine on, go get a cup of tea (or coffee / water / milk, whatever you fancy), come back to desk, then login, swing around on the chair and talk to boss / workmates. Now I've had my cuppa and I'm ready to work, and (finally) so is my work computer.

You mention that your machine is in your room, it can't be that hard to hit the start button on your way to the toilet for the morning piss can it?

Primoz · 2009-05-04 15:37:04

Well it only tooks ~20s to get to KDM that's not that much. Mostly it's the all the things that start with KDE by default (as I want them to start) that take some time.

But that's not really that important. I decided that I'll decide on the wim should I shutdown or just suspend my computer.
If I have a feeling that I'll need it still and fast I will suspend, but if I decided that I won't need it for a long time I'll shutdown.

Primoz · 2009-05-04 15:38:19

Oh and thanks for all the answers.

Last edited by Primoz (2009-05-04 15:38:40)

iBertus · 2009-05-04 20:54:44

I would say suspend is good. I'm planning on trying to get it working with my machine because the BIOS/POST process is 45-60sec on my board (Intel D5400XS) not counting what it takes for grub+kernel+login. So, I'm looking at 1 minute minimum. I think that suspend will allow me to start again in 20 seconds without having to use that much energy to maintain the OS in memory.

Oh, and forgot to say that my laptop is suspened everytime I close the lid. It has never failed me and that is with heavy usage. I didn't even have to configure anything to make it work like it should. Just installed the proper package to get pm-suspend and it worked.

Last edited by iBertus (2009-05-04 20:55:55)

Primoz · 2009-05-04 21:33:04

Today I did a quite long suspend from 18:30 to 23:00 and after I "un-suspend" my computer the network stoped working and I had to reset my computer as I didn't want to troubleshoot it aat that time.
Anyway I'll have to check if that was just one-off error or is something more problematic.
For now i'll stay on shutdown and will use suspend trying to replicate the bug or for short periods of time...

Last edited by Primoz (2009-05-04 21:33:21)

Anikom15 · 2009-05-04 22:17:21

If it's the hard dirve that's loud, I believe you can reduce the noise in the BIOS settings. I don't think either suspend to Ram or suspend to disk is harmful, but if I were to take a guess, I would say suspend to disk is healthier.

bender02 · 2009-05-05 06:58:04

Primoz wrote:

Today I did a quite long suspend from 18:30 to 23:00 and after I "un-suspend" my computer the network stoped working and I had to reset my computer as I didn't want to troubleshoot it aat that time.
Anyway I'll have to check if that was just one-off error or is something more problematic.
For now i'll stay on shutdown and will use suspend trying to replicate the bug or for short periods of time...

Usually just unloading the kernel modules - drivers of networks cards - and reloading them again and restarting the network daemon should be enough.

hatten · 2009-05-05 16:13:53

When i rerouted my cables to not to go through my router i had to restart the network daemon after every wake up.

Primoz · 2009-05-05 16:58:32

@Anikom15: My disk aren't that loud. It's the fan that's loud. But I think I can set speed for it in BIOS to.
@bender02 & hatten: I'll try to restart netowork daemons next time when that happens.

BTW: I have a static IP and a network which goes through switch...

jwcxz · 2009-05-05 21:58:11

~ $ uptime
17:33:33 up 3 days, 1:20, 2 users, load average: 0.43, 0.77, 0.75

That's my laptop, so as you can imagine, I use suspend.

I prefer suspending my laptop to shutting it down simply because it resumes instantly. Suspension worked almost out of the box for me in Arch, so I guess I'm fairly lucky. I have a few friends who run *cough*otherdistros*cough* and their laptops won't work with suspend and instead of trying to figure out what's wrong, they prefer to just shut their computers down.

As for a desktop, the usefulness of suspension is definitely related to how many times you need to turn it on and off. My old desktop was really noisy, making it difficult for me to concentrate when I was working on other things, so I would turn it off often. That desktop was fairly slow, so suspension was more useful to me. However, if I were using a more recent system, I'd probably just turn it off and then turn it on again when I needed it.

On a laptop however, you might be throttling the CPU speed to save battery life and so startup might be slower. If you're in public, well you wouldn't want to seem as though you had a slow laptop, would you (*gasps*).

Last edited by jwcxz (2009-05-05 21:58:40)

vadblm · 2009-05-05 23:44:16

Primoz wrote:

Today I did a quite long suspend from 18:30 to 23:00 and after I "un-suspend" my computer the network stoped working and I had to reset my computer as I didn't want to troubleshoot it aat that time.
Anyway I'll have to check if that was just one-off error or is something more problematic.
For now i'll stay on shutdown and will use suspend trying to replicate the bug or for short periods of time...

Just tried STR last night and was surprized by the same problem, the network was down on resume.
However, sudo /etc/rc.d/network restart brought it back on. Later on, I tried suspend/resume within about 15 minutes, everything worked fine, without network dropouts.

I think the problem is that my box obtains network via DHCP, and while being suspended long enough, the DHCP lease just expires, and there's no dhcpcd running to renew it.

Aren't you using DHCP too?

pyther · 2009-05-06 12:16:18

That's actually sounds like a really good reason why the net is dropping out!

The op states he has a static ip however and in that case there shouldn't be drop outs...
@OP the next time it happens check dmesg and also run ifconfig and see if the NIC device is listed.

Suspend has gotten a lot better in the past few years, but it stills has its issues.

Primoz · 2009-05-06 21:16:47

I don't use DHCP just to clear things up. I have static IP (for various reasons).
And even though I'm still sceptical about suspending over night. I also like to turn off the switch of the extention on which my computer is pluged in a "quasi attempt to be green".
My uptime today is: 23:11:49 up 13:08, 2 users, load average: 1.78, 1.15, 0.77. Of this 13 hours I used computer for around three .

I'm really liking suspend, especially to disk. As in KDE there's a "bug" when you suspend to RAM, it doesn't lock the session.

Anikom15 · 2009-05-06 22:24:08

If you have no suitable option, you can just turn the computer on as soon as you get up, and shutdown before bed. The time it takes to get ready will give plenty of time for the computer to boot.

Arch Linux

#1 2009-05-02 18:33:57

Suspend vs. Shutdown

#2 2009-05-02 18:51:50

Re: Suspend vs. Shutdown

#3 2009-05-02 18:54:57

Re: Suspend vs. Shutdown

#4 2009-05-02 18:57:14

Re: Suspend vs. Shutdown

#5 2009-05-02 18:58:24

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#6 2009-05-02 18:58:52

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#7 2009-05-02 19:16:36

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#8 2009-05-02 19:35:56

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#9 2009-05-02 19:44:48

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#10 2009-05-02 19:50:47

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#11 2009-05-04 05:19:47

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#12 2009-05-04 13:58:41

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#13 2009-05-04 15:37:04

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