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How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

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Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#41

Post by kragen »

jedberg wrote: post #36
kragen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> and then only people using shitty ISPs that don't respect the TTL will ever see extra latency. In my experience running large websites, that's about 10% of the internet, if not more. When I made a DNS change, only about 70% of the traffic dropped off in the TTL. The rest took anywhere between a few hours and a few weeks (and some never dropped off, we had to just let them fail after a while).

Thanks, I didn't realize it was that large. :'(

Do you think the advent of DoH will improve that situation?

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#42

Post by mc3 »

hannob wrote: post #26

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. p…

For real efficiency we'd need renewable feeding the grid, then massive and efficient server racks, with your tiddly website running in a docker container on there somewhere, hopefully this is on an edge node close to the person viewing the site. In other words economies of scale.

The nice thing about that is that you don't have to change the tech much, you can still use digital ocean or whatever, but they need to get their power from renewable, which in turn means their grid needs to.

The not so nice thing is we are not changing fast enough. I hope pure price pressure from tech advantages will get us from fossils to renewable.

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#43

Post by fwip »

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…

Check out Beaker Browser!

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#44

Post by bacon_waffle »

jedberg wrote: post #25
wtracy wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think the equinox is special in this regard - as the days at one point get longer, they shorten at the antipode.

As a practical matter insolation at dawn/dusk won't be able to power much, without a PV array that would be quite oversize during the day.

Lots of interesting optimisation problems in this area. But at this scale batteries and solar panels come in discrete sizes, so it's a bit academic.

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#45

Post by driverdan »

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

You wouldn't want to power directly from the panels without a battery. It would cause high instability on cloudy days, possibly leading to file system corruption.

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#46

Post by EGreg »

dragontamer wrote: post #37
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…

For more local purposes, solar + wind is a nice complement. Wind is strongest at night, while solar is best in the day. Nuclear usually needs to keep running, and fewer people use electricity at night (unless you live in Philippines where it is common to only run AC at night to save on electricity).

Also, you can use a refrigerator at night... the cold IS the battery.

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#47

Post by LinuxBender »

hannob wrote: post #26

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. p…

One use case I imagine would be for folks that live off-grid, but still want to have some home automation. Realistically these folks are using large banks of batteries, large solar panels and big inverters, but there is no harm in optimizing the load for long run time when there are periods of low sunlight and wind.

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#48

Post by jedberg »

kragen wrote: post #41
jedberg wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and then only people using shitty ISPs that don't respect the TTL will ever see extra latency. In my experience running large websites, that's about 10% of the internet, if not more. When I made a DNS change, only about 70% of the traffic dropped off in the TTL. The rest took anywhere between a few hours and a few weeks (and some never dropped off, we had to just let them fail after a while).

Thanks, I didn't realize it was that large. :'( Do you think the advent of DoH will improve that situation?

I don't think so. DoH deals more with streamlining the transmission of requests and responses, but I don't recall any part of the RFC dealing with TTLs.

You'll still be talking to your local DNS server with its own caching rules.

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#49

Post by jedberg »

bacon_waffle wrote: post #44
jedberg wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don't think the equinox is special in this regard - as the days at one point get longer, they shorten at the antipode. As a practical matter insolation at dawn/dusk won't be able to power much, without a PV array that would be quite oversize during the day. Lots of interesting optimisation problems in this area. But at this scale batteries and solar panels come in discrete sizes, so it's a bit academic.

Ah, I see what you mean. If they are antipodes, then dusk and dawn will happen together every day. This is a good point. I was thinking there would be more overlap on the other days, but you're right, there wouldn't be.

Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?

#50

Post by kragen »

driverdan wrote: post #45
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

You wouldn't want to power directly from the panels without a battery. It would cause high instability on cloudy days, possibly leading to file system corruption.

The panel voltage is pretty stable until the illuminance gets really low (unless you're drawing a lot of current). Diodes such as solar cells are roughly constant-voltage devices. You can get a pretty long way avoiding filesystem corruption by mounting things read-only, but (I've heard) some SSDs aren't really read-only even when they're read-only, because of read disturb and the attempt to compensate for it in the FTL. 10 seconds of 2 W at 3–6 V is about two farads, so you might be able to get acceptable stability with a supercapacitor in the 1–10 farad range instead of a battery.
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