7 comments

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  Dan Norris

  1 year ago

  My site stinks too, but I'm comforted by the fact that so few people visit it, so I'm not making that big of a negative impact. Save the environment--don't go to my website :).
  
  Seriously, though, I think this makes a lot of sense and someday in my copious free time, I'll see about raising my score too. Thanks to you (and Jason) for bringing this to everyone's attention--good stuff.
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  Jake

  1 year ago

  There's another idea for a ribbon. "Save the environment. Don't go to my blog, seriously."
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  Alex

  1 year ago

  Hold on a second. Where are you saving the energy: on the client, or on the server side? Now, if you don't go to the web-site, does this mean your computer will be switched off? If not, it will still consume as much power as it says on the power supply unit, won't it? Maybe I am out of touch with the power saving technology, or I don't understand how the power supply works.
  
  Suppose the server is not serving the pages anymore, "saving the environment". Isn't it still up and running? Only instead of being busy, it is doing idle loops. BTW, there is an opinion that the current data centres aren't loaded even 10% of their capacity, and the problem is not the lack of the job to do, it is the lack of progress on all of the fronts, meaning IO wait and idle loops waiting to sync up with the other components of the distributed system. (See AMD's guy talk on TheRegister)
  
  Let's take the efficiency into account, i.e. how many Watts were spent on a single CPU cycle doing useful job. You can reduce the amount of job to do (rewrite the code to reduce the complexity of the problem), you can reduce the number of the wasted CPU cycles (rewrite the code to optimise synchronisation), and not only reducing the Watts spent by a single CPU. Otherwise, perhaps, 80386 would be the better option than Opterons and Xeons, because 80386 spends so much less energy per hour!..
  
  
  Just my 2p, which under current market conditions are the same as your 3.9 cent. ;-)
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  Alex

  1 year ago

  Ah, doh, not the Watts, but Joules, of course!
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  Jake

  1 year ago

  I'm talking about the server side, specifically how a blog owner or web site developer can tune pages to make them more efficient and therefore less consumptive to the server.
  
  This is a targeted exercise, and you are correct that there are larger issues at work on both the client and server sides of the Interwebs equation. Jason's tips are meant to provide the little guys, like me, with a way to accomplish two things: 1) serve pages faster and 2) save on server load, which also (bonus) lightens the overall consumption of energy.
  
  I say little guys because I can't control what iron the data center uses, what CPU is in that iron, how the CPU handles I/O and idle times, etc. I also can't control the overall load, just my own little piece.
  
  So, if your point is that this is a little thing, spot on.
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  Jason Grigsby

  1 year ago

  One of the more interesting things I read recently was a person talking about how we can optimize data processing to be distributed geographically based on which data centers have excess processing and energy capacity. It is a fascinating idea.
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  Jake

  1 year ago

  Nice, like geographic load balancing, sounds like something Cisco would be into pretty deep. Over the next 18-24 months, we'll see lots of green tech initiatives like that.
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