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This website has 81% battery power remaining

solar.lowtechmagazine.com

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Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#111

Post by nathanfig »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #94
onion2k wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

aren’t websites just getting worse and bloated with JS crap Maybe they are, but that bloat is just some static files that are sent to the user as far as the web server is concerned. They should have no practical impact on the battery life of the server. There are JS sites that render on the server as well, but that's not the bloat you mean.

And, heck, there's a solid argument that server-side rendering is more environmentally efficient, since the work is done in a data-center, which can (1) utilize caching to avoid re-doing work and (2) be built in an optimal location for electricity generation.

Conversely, you are losing the distributed computing gained by rendering on the client, and therefore need a bigger server to scale when needed. And HTTP caching can and should be used for API responses as well.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#113

Post by RussianCow »

Nextgrid wrote: post #69
jmondi wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a false equivalence. You are comparing static sites of the past to dynamic sites of today. Apples to oranges.

The vast majority of sites don't need to be dynamic though.

[citation needed]

Websites have become significantly more complex in the last two decades.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#114

Post by stephen_g »

pezzana wrote: post #72

This is a fascinating site beyond the power indicator. For example, a recent article discusses low-tech solar panels: > ... To start with, ever since the 1950s, solar panels have been unfit for recycling, resulting in a waste stream that ends up in landfills. This waste stream will grow significantly during the coming years. Solar panels are discarded only after at least 25 to 30 years, and most have been installed o…

We have some solar panel recycling companies coming online here in Australia already ([1] for example, but there are at least three or four other companies I've heard of starting up), and I'm sure that will be the case elsewhere as well, so I don't know how accurate that is.

It's worth putting it in perspective too - huge amounts of waste are generated in power generation that solar is replacing, like coal power. One source (quoting research from IEA but the original document link is dead now) puts the amount of coal ash produced each year at 3.7 billion tons [2]. Here in Australia, it makes up more than one fifth of all waste produced in the country, and most of it is just dumped (in some places around the world it's used as an additive in concrete). But coal fly ash is full of highly toxic elements, including heavy metals.

1. https://reneweconomy.com.au/australias-first-solar-panel-rec... 2. https://www.envirojustice.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/...

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#115

Post by RussianCow »

Retric wrote: post #63
scrollaway wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

JS bloat can have significant server overhead when data is loaded dynamically. It’s generally more efficient to have one GET request that can be heavily optimized than a lot of tiny XMLHttpRequest that need to be parsed separately. That may flip around when someone spends a long time interacting with a SPA, but there is plenty of truly terrible code in the wild.

> It’s generally more efficient to have one GET request that can be heavily optimized than a lot of tiny XMLHttpRequest that need to be parsed separately.

Without context, this statement is misleading at best and downright false at worst. You’re right that splitting up a single request into multiple would incur a small performance penalty, but you also generally gain other advantages like more localized caching and the ability to conditionally skip requests. In the long run, those advantages may actually make your app significantly more efficient. But without discussing details like this, it’s pointless to make wild assumptions about performance.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#117

Post by driverdan »

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 think this also shows how inefficient modern website hosting is.

I suspect it's the opposite. Hosting a static site like this on a service designed for it is going to use less power than using dedicated hardware. Single server can host hundred to thousands of static sites. The power use per site is going to be much lower.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#118

Post by chakkepolja »

onion2k wrote: post #78
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…

aren’t websites just getting worse and bloated with JS crap Maybe they are, but that bloat is just some static files that are sent to the user as far as the web server is concerned. They should have no practical impact on the battery life of the server. There are JS sites that render on the server as well, but that's not the bloat you mean.

I think he is talking about badly written JS code serving the APIs and the overhead of it.

Of course it's hard to debate whether JS, Java or PHP is most inefficient in that regard.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#119

Post by chakkepolja »

throwaway11602 wrote: post #108
hattmall wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this so so much. The problem is too much reliances on frameworks and add on libraries. Developers will import an entire framework that for the benefit of a single feature. It's mind blowing to look at the amount of js includes for seemingly simple sites. Stackoverflow answers that direct you to import a library or framework should be banned in most cases. I will often have to scroll past several answers…

I am guilty of this, and I feel bad for it. I am not a front end developer, but I have built a few web sites for various projects here and there. I certainly don't NEED to use a front-end framework, but I don't want have to spend a ton of time crafting CSS rules and figuing out how many divs to nest. To get something done quickly, my choices pretty much boil down to plain, unstyled, pages, or a full blown framework l…

What's your opinion about bootstrap? Unfashionable I get it, but doesn't it serve the purpose?

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#120

Post by dylan604 »

RussianCow wrote: post #113
Nextgrid wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of sites don't need to be dynamic though.

[citation needed] Websites have become significantly more complex in the last two decades.

For the user's benefit, or for the dev's?
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