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  • benbenjamineskola@hachyderm.io
    Oct 31, 2026, 2:22 PM

    @funkylab there is a related problem, which is when hourly/daily jobs get run all at the same minute across a large number of machines — updates for example. The issue there is either network traffic or load on the update servers though; and spreading it out doesn’t (and isn’t intended) to reduce the overall load, just to reduce the size of the spikes.

    So I guess we also have to consider whether the power spikes are an issue in themselves (if they’re even measurable), or whether we’re more concerned with overall power consumption.

    @hzulla

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Replies

  • Marcus Müllerfunkylab@mastodon.social
    Oct 31, 2026, 2:29 PM

    @benjamineskola @hzulla well they certainly are if whatever the machines are doing is suddenly power intense, and if the machines are a significant consumer in the synchronous grid. (Which my guess would be is something data center operators need to negotiate when getting a grid operator to connect up their DC; they need to buy cable capacity and build transformers for Max load, not just median load)
    At a residential PCs scale, wouldn't worry about it much. English tea kettles & halftime breaks.

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  • EQeq@mas.to
    Oct 31, 2026, 8:45 PM

    @funkylab @benjamineskola @hzulla When I first started with computers we had gotten our hands on some old harddrives that were about 5 cm thick. They had some jumper settings for how many seconds to delay spinup on boot. Since they were pretty heavy the engines would draw too much power if you start two harddrives at the same time and kill the power to the computer. I think the new hdd's we bought when we had money had the same thing for a few years.

    My cron jobs are still all running a few minutes off the hour where I can thanks to this experience. Some have randomized wait times between starts.

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  • ganxelganxel@oldbytes.space
    Nov 1, 2026, 1:38 PM

    @eq @funkylab @benjamineskola @hzulla ah yes; remember when (external) hard drives needed to be "spun up" for 15-30 seconds before turning on the machine? My Atari Falcon had a *very* loud Seagate SCSI/ACSI drive that was temperamental like that. Also it's been 16 years since it went in the attic so it's probably a paperweight now.

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  • EQeq@mas.to
    Nov 1, 2026, 1:50 PM

    @ganxel Yes, I also had a falcon but it had a standard IDE drive since it was rebuilt into a tower by some swedish company I think. It was rather nice until I plugged it in to copy all the files. The powersupply in the house wasn't the best, it gave less than it was supposed to do and that gave too much power to the HDD cable and it started burning.

    Beware of low quality third party PC PSU's :-)

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  • ganxelganxel@oldbytes.space
    Nov 1, 2026, 2:14 PM

    @eq ooh that tower setup sounds neat! Maybe similar to the "Medusa" machines?

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  • EQeq@mas.to
    Nov 1, 2026, 2:18 PM

    @ganxel It was just a normal 030 with the motherboard ripped out and put in a normal tower that they had customised to fit. It had a breakout board for the keyboard so you could connect a normal PC keyboard and a normal (cheap) PC power supply. The rest was empty space for all your hard drives connected to the single IDE connector if I remember right :-)

    Had totally forgotten about the Medusas, that would have been neat to have.

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  • benbenjamineskola@hachyderm.io
    Oct 31, 2026, 6:46 PM

    @johntimaeus oh yeah, I don’t mean to say it’s a new or unsolved issue, but rather something that’s been a consideration in running scheduled jobs for a long time by now.

    @funkylab @hzulla

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