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How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

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Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#21

Post by jedberg »

jandrese wrote: post #19
jedberg wrote: post #13

I feel like they could get almost 100% uptime with a lot less effort if they just put a second server on the other side of the world. The antipode of Barcelona (where this is based) is pretty close to New Zealand. If they put a second server there and then used a anycast IP, chances are one of the servers would be up at all times with no battery at all. Edit: Changed multicast to anycast because for some reason my co…

Multicast doesn't work on the big-I Internet. A battery system is almost certainly easier than physical servers spread across the globe, even when you account for the cost of the battery.

I meant anycast (fixed now). But based on this writeup, they don't seem to care about how much of their own time it takes, only to prove it is possible. It was in that vain that I suggest two servers would be better.

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#22

Post by gibspaulding »

bmgxyz wrote: post #4
agentultra wrote: post #3

I wonder how much more efficient this would be if the content was distributed on a p2p network? I would love to get into distributed web tech. I'm not sure how much of a market there is for it though. The benefit of being able to have these scuttlebutt networks of low-power, efficient devices is a lower-overall carbon footprint for the common case of serving low-fidelity content like web pages and small applications.…

There was a project I stumbled upon over a year ago that implemented a P2P Web, but I can't seem to dig it up now. There was a client that mediated the connection between your machine and the network, and you'd just browse the web normally by pointing your browser at localhost:someport. It was kind of neat, since everyone who visited a resource could act as the server for somebody else, but it looked to me like it wa…

Were you thinking of i2p? I believe it's a similar project that I've always intended to look into, but never actually have.

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#23

Post by jedberg »

kragen wrote: post #16
jedberg wrote: post #13

I feel like they could get almost 100% uptime with a lot less effort if they just put a second server on the other side of the world. The antipode of Barcelona (where this is based) is pretty close to New Zealand. If they put a second server there and then used a anycast IP, chances are one of the servers would be up at all times with no battery at all. Edit: Changed multicast to anycast because for some reason my co…

That is an excellent idea. With three or four servers they could entirely avoid batteries. I think you mean anycast, not multicast, but a less exotic option would be to use DNS failover, or even just round-robin DNS with no explicit failover: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/10927/using-m... https://www.nber.org/sys-admin/dns-failover.html

Yeah I meant anycast (fixed above). And it's true, the other options would work too, but there would be added latency.

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#24

Post by ip26 »

alex_young wrote: post #5

Even with the additional upfront expense, lithium batteries would make this setup much more efficient due to the larger allowed cycles and would also reduce the environmental impact due to the low impact nature of lithium extraction.

Lead acid batteries are eminently recyclable. Something like 99% of the lead in a new car battery is from old recycled car batteries.

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#25

Post by jedberg »

wtracy wrote: post #18
jedberg wrote: post #13

I feel like they could get almost 100% uptime with a lot less effort if they just put a second server on the other side of the world. The antipode of Barcelona (where this is based) is pretty close to New Zealand. If they put a second server there and then used a anycast IP, chances are one of the servers would be up at all times with no battery at all. Edit: Changed multicast to anycast because for some reason my co…

That assumes that each location receives enough sunlight to keep the server operational for at least twelve hours a day, which doesn't sound realistic for a setup with no batteries. Three servers spaced equidistant around the world might work. If you're going down that route anyway, you could add redundant servers at different latitudes to hedge against cloudy weather.

> That assumes that each location receives enough sunlight to keep the server operational for at least twelve hours a day

Only one of them needs to be up at a time. By choosing the antipode, by definition one of them will be in sun when the other is not (weather notwithstanding). The equinox would be the hardest day to deal with because they would both be at low energy at sunrise/sunset.

So yes, you're right, a third server would probably make it work almost 100% of the time.

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#26

Post by hannob »

This may sound snarky, but...

I really wonder how helpful such projects are. Making the Internet greener is undoubtedly an important goal, but I feel this is perpetuating a myth that we're gonna fix the climate crisis with small-scale projects from below.

Practically this is doing nothing to provide any relevant fix for the problem. What we should be doing is thinking about how we can fix the problem at scale, e.g. pressuring large IT companies to get real about the green image they like to peddle. (i.e. care more about news like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22167858 )

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#28

Post by ip26 »

agumonkey wrote: post #11

side note: with potential sub 7nm semiconductor processes, a wide amount of sophisticated chips could run on small ~solar (say 1W)

As is often the case, the most obvious target for optimization (the computer, 1-2W) has already hit diminishing returns. Their biggest energy hog is the router (10W), which they aren't running on solar.

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#29

Post by kragen »

jedberg wrote: post #23
kragen wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is an excellent idea. With three or four servers they could entirely avoid batteries. I think you mean anycast, not multicast, but a less exotic option would be to use DNS failover, or even just round-robin DNS with no explicit failover: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/10927/using-m... https://www.nber.org/sys-admin/dns-failover.html

Yeah I meant anycast (fixed above). And it's true, the other options would work too, but there would be added latency.

With DNS failover there is only added latency during the time interval between when a server goes down, causing the DNS to get updated, and when the dead IP times out everywhere, which can easily be a few minutes. If the server can anticipate that it is going to go down it can remove itself, and then only people using shitty ISPs that don't respect the TTL will ever see extra latency.

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#30

Post by ReactiveJelly »

I see they're still using dithered PNGs instead of JPEGs for images.

The first time I saw it (I don't have the numbers handy now) I ran some experiments and it seemed clear to me that a JPEG would work much better, and if dithered PNGs were really a good option, more people would be doing them. This was on photographs, where JPEGs are kind of a home-run and PNGs aren't good no matter what you do to them.

This time they're doing diagrams, which would probably be best as regular PNGs - The dithering requires you compress a pattern that's almost noise, and a JPEG would add artifacts without being any smaller.

Here's some other thoughts:

- WebP does exist, but of course you have to do some negotiation to avoid blank images on browsers that won't decode it.

- The site is behind CloudFlare anyway, so if it's a static site with no auth you can probably just put the whole thing on CF / AWS / whatever and it won't use more energy in the cloud than proxying for your own server already does.

- CloudFlare probably has a button that re-compresses everything as WebP for you.

- Economies of scale always apply.

On scale: The transmission losses for the whole US grid is well under 10%. If solar is such a great idea, build a solar farm and run 1,000,000 websites. Or 1,000 houses. It'll be more efficient than putting panels on individual houses or servers. There is no power source that gets more efficient when you have a bunch of individuals running it instead of a power company. Whether the power company is trustworthy is a question of politics, not technology.

This always gets to me when I see EV chargers with VAWTs at a grocery store. If VAWTS are so great, why isn't the grid building them? The grid already has the big wind turbines which are presumably more efficient than a VAWT. So why not buy power from the grid? Because it's a PR stunt.

In short, I wish they'd be more clear about it being a cool thing and not a practical thing. Solar is practical. Wind is practical. At scale.

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