Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

This website has 81% battery power remaining

solar.lowtechmagazine.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 365 posts

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#51

Post by IncRnd »

Eikon wrote: post #27
widdakay wrote: post #11

I think this also shows how inefficient modern website hosting is. The fact that this person was able to get a raspberry pi to host the #1 website on HN powered by a small 50 watt solar panel is very cool (meaning maybe 10w average power budget), but also shouldn't be as uncommon as it is today. To put this in perspective, a modern server uses 50-100 watts idle doing nothing, and many more under load. To handle the t…

> a modern server uses 50-100 watts idle doing nothing I'm really tired of hearing this. "Serverless because otherwise server doing nothing", "very small virtual machine because otherwise server doing nothing". The server is not doing "nothing" it's waiting for incoming requests. It's like if you told "this cashier is doing nothing because there is no customers in the store". When a server is loaded at capacity minus…

If there are 100 servers but only one is needed to handle the user traffic, then 99% of those servers are considered to be "doing nothing" even if they are powered on and running software. At the end of the day, running that software is meaningless to the business and to customers.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#52

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #26
micromacrofoot wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a lot of the web would probably be better off if it were

I think so, WordPress that isnt cached to a frozen state on the backend is kind of silly in my eyes, the only exception would be comments, but you could hack around that by using Disqus or something, voila.

Just POST to a PHP script that regenerates the cached HTML including comments.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#53

Post by hiptobecubic »

amelius wrote: post #35
widdakay wrote: post #11

I think this also shows how inefficient modern website hosting is. The fact that this person was able to get a raspberry pi to host the #1 website on HN powered by a small 50 watt solar panel is very cool (meaning maybe 10w average power budget), but also shouldn't be as uncommon as it is today. To put this in perspective, a modern server uses 50-100 watts idle doing nothing, and many more under load. To handle the t…

Wouldn't it be way more efficient to run it on some (virtualized) node in a datacenter that is optimized for it?

Yes but it only matters if you ignore all the constant factors and sunk costs that exist. For example, I already have an rpi and a solar panel. My crappy google home mini wastes more power than this doing absolutely nothing. It's kind of pointless to hyper-optimize efficiency of a little server like this given all the waste around it.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#54

Post by flatiron »

marricks wrote: post #32
widdakay wrote: post #11

I think this also shows how inefficient modern website hosting is. The fact that this person was able to get a raspberry pi to host the #1 website on HN powered by a small 50 watt solar panel is very cool (meaning maybe 10w average power budget), but also shouldn't be as uncommon as it is today. To put this in perspective, a modern server uses 50-100 watts idle doing nothing, and many more under load. To handle the t…

I hate to be that old foggy but, aren’t websites just getting worse and bloated with JS crap? I’ve had a couple websites I use daily for work just get flashy new interfaces which causes 1/3 to 1/2 second delays in the interface which used to not exist, previously they just had normal page load delays. For example, SalesForce Lightning, their UI overhaul. Old UI is mainly just flat HTML with some loading on fields. Ne…

The new lightning makes it such a pain to do my time cards. Try to open my sub projects to see how many hours are left and have a tab open with my time card and constantly errors out. I can’t be the only person who checks hours left on sub projects when entering my time.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#55

Post by goodpoint »

ralph84 wrote: post #25
malwarebytess wrote: post #10

> This was caused by a software upgrade of the Linux kernel, which increased the average power use of the server from 1.19 to 1.49 watts I wonder what change in the linux kernel caused the increased load. Someone out there is responsible for this crime!

This is an area where Apple is way ahead of everyone else. A code change that increases power usage 25% wouldn’t make it past CI at Apple.

On the contrary. Linux runs on any Android or FLOSS phone, almost every car and plane, TV, router, and plenty of industrial devices.

The amount of testing that Linux goes through is staggering.

This has to be a specific bug on that platform in its specific configuration.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#56

Post by IncRnd »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #26
micromacrofoot wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a lot of the web would probably be better off if it were

I think so, WordPress that isnt cached to a frozen state on the backend is kind of silly in my eyes, the only exception would be comments, but you could hack around that by using Disqus or something, voila.

Comments are far from the only exception to static page caches! There are often dynamic changes via plugins or functions.php. There are shortcodes and a number of other examples too.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#57

Post by scrollaway »

simion314 wrote: post #47
marricks wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to be that old foggy but, aren’t websites just getting worse and bloated with JS crap? I’ve had a couple websites I use daily for work just get flashy new interfaces which causes 1/3 to 1/2 second delays in the interface which used to not exist, previously they just had normal page load delays. For example, SalesForce Lightning, their UI overhaul. Old UI is mainly just flat HTML with some loading on fields. Ne…

>and bloated with JS crap? CSS animations too , especially the ones that use infinite.

Nothing to do with site hosting. css animations don't eat the server's CPU; nor does JS bloat (other than bandwidth).

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#58

Post by goodpoint »

widdakay wrote: post #11

I think this also shows how inefficient modern website hosting is. The fact that this person was able to get a raspberry pi to host the #1 website on HN powered by a small 50 watt solar panel is very cool (meaning maybe 10w average power budget), but also shouldn't be as uncommon as it is today. To put this in perspective, a modern server uses 50-100 watts idle doing nothing, and many more under load. To handle the t…

> this also shows how inefficient modern website hosting is

And this is in a world without distributed, locality-aware caching.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#59

Post by goodpoint »

berkes wrote: post #49
DietPi wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not a Raspberry Pi, but an Olimex Olinuxino A20 Lime 2 and a 30W solar panel: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html#hardware But yes, web hosting, especially for small/mid traffic websites has become very cheap (in power consumption and in money), especially for static websites where CDNs can be used to serve assets and static content from edge caches. A full x86 server or PC is often total overkill and…

Did the author use a CDN? Because that's kindof cheating: you are just having another (free) service burning the electricity for you. I assumed the solar server serves the sites directly, because of this. Maybe I was wrong.

There is no CDN, thankfully.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#60

Post by MobiusHorizons »

IncRnd wrote: post #51
Eikon wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a modern server uses 50-100 watts idle doing nothing I'm really tired of hearing this. "Serverless because otherwise server doing nothing", "very small virtual machine because otherwise server doing nothing". The server is not doing "nothing" it's waiting for incoming requests. It's like if you told "this cashier is doing nothing because there is no customers in the store". When a server is loaded at capacity minus…

If there are 100 servers but only one is needed to handle the user traffic, then 99% of those servers are considered to be "doing nothing" even if they are powered on and running software. At the end of the day, running that software is meaningless to the business and to customers.

I think the point was that "ready and waiting" is valuable to the end customer, even if it only makes a different later when they are doing something. It's kind-of like how firemen are valuable even when they are not getting calls, because they are available for low latency response instead of busy doing something else. The idea that this is just wasted computation is therefore somewhat disingenuous.
Post reply on HN