Measuring Software Energy I

I've been interested lately at looking at the energy usage of software.

Since my current energy usage is invisible to me, it is hard to actually grasp just how bad the situation is. But I often am amazed at how inefficient many solutions are, they offer very little gain.

For example, to ensure that a service is always available, at my old job we had 3+ servers running in parallel, just in case one server hall gets hit by a tornado or other disasters.

Most services do not even need 99.99+% availability, they'd be fine with just 2 nines. Maybe that's what we should strive for?

Anyways, if we want to understand what we can do better, it is good to understand the energy footprint right now.

After some investigation I came by websitecarbon.com, which is extremely easy to use and gives some rough estimations. It estimates the cost of:

• Data transfer over the wire
• Energy intensity of web data
• Energy source used by the data centre
• Carbon intensity of electricity
• Website traffic

It links to Sustainable web design: Estimating digital emissions which I will need to look at closer.

I also asked a Permacomputing group if they had any recommendations. Almost immediately I was recommended a few tools for measuring energy usage:

• watt-wiser
• scaphandre
• kepler

Excited to dive deeper into these resources and see how I can understand and optimize.

- Marc