Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%

Post by sesqu » Sat, Apr 15, 2023, 12:51 PM UTC

tinglymintyfrsh wrote: post #347

arnaudsm wrote: post #40

Quick napkin math of the wasted power : Firefox has ~300e6 users, let's assume the bug wasted 5 extra watts 4 hours a day. That's 250 megawatts saved, the equivalent of an average coal power plant. Because some Microsoft engineer missed a bug.

It's 5.5 MW. That's not how power or energy works. 5 [W*hr/day] (Kept in energy units per interval rather than average power). 200e6 users/day who surf for maybe 4 hours/day 5 * 200e6 * 4 / 24 = 133 [MW*hr/day] (133/24 = 5.5 MW) A typical US home uses 11 [MW*hr/y] or 0.36 [MW*hr/day]. (Convert to power draw, that's 0.015 MW.) mean consumption of roughly 400 US homes (133 / 0.36). The smallest US grid-tied operational…

  5W/user * 200e6 user * 4h/24h = 167 MW
  11 MWh/a/home = 0.00125 MW/home
  167 MW / (0.00125 MW/home) = 133 000 home

Post by aranchelk » Sat, Apr 15, 2023, 3:55 PM UTC

harshreality wrote: post #428

aranchelk wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use a 7 year old low-power laptop. Cooling, electricity usage, and performance of Electron apps are never an issue. Crashes, bugs, lost data, and bad usability still are. I’d rather have devs spend time on that stuff. If Electron frees up organizational resources to do what’s actually important, I applaud devs for using it.

Not an issue for you , that you know of , because you have no equivalent software that's written in a more performant language (or at least critical portions of the codebase written in a more performant language). That's part of the problem; in most cases, software users don't know what life would be like with better software. They assume the performance they see is close to optimal, or at least that the devs made an…