Principles of Green Software Engineering
principles.green
Principles of Green Software Engineering
1–10 of 99 posts
Re: Principles of Green Software Engineering
#2It seems hard to achieve most of these goals independent of programming language and framework. At Facebook, the Instagram team has built tooling to inform engineers how many millions of dollars each line of their Python code costs to execute, but the easiest way for them to save those dollars and Joules is to not run back APIs used by billions of people with Python
Re: Principles of Green Software Engineering
#3None of the websites or posts on this topic that I've come across contain any numbers.
Would it really make a difference for the average project? Honest question.
Re: Principles of Green Software Engineering
#4It seems most of these boil down to: build more efficient software.
Software that is more efficient with the network and CPU is also cheaper to run. So the incentives are generally aligned. When I deploy a system I want it to run on 5 servers not 50 for cost reasons not because I'm being green. If I'm being green by accident, that's a bonus.
I'm glad on the "measure" side it gives examples of how to measure (though I can't vouch for how good they are).
But really, as a web app developer (which is most of HN, I think) this doesn't apply "too" much beyond just increasing hardware efficiency which you'll want to do anyway. It intuitively seems graphics and GPU heavy apps are the biggest offenders.
Re: Principles of Green Software Engineering
#5It seems hard to achieve most of these goals independent of programming language and framework. At Facebook, the Instagram team has built tooling to inform engineers how many millions of dollars each line of their Python code costs to execute, but the easiest way for them to save those dollars and Joules is to not run back APIs used by billions of people with Python
Until I did a year of Plone development, I always thought webapps were IO bound.
Re: Principles of Green Software Engineering
#6It seems most of these boil down to: build more efficient software. Software that is more efficient with the network and CPU is also cheaper to run. So the incentives are generally aligned. When I deploy a system I want it to run on 5 servers not 50 for cost reasons not because I'm being green. If I'm being green by accident, that's a bonus. I'm glad on the "measure" side it gives examples of how to measure (though I…
I do wonder how many kW of power things that HN generally disparages as bloated (Electron being the main one people talk about) actually adds up to versus more efficient technologies?
Re: Principles of Green Software Engineering
#7It seems most of these boil down to: build more efficient software. Software that is more efficient with the network and CPU is also cheaper to run. So the incentives are generally aligned. When I deploy a system I want it to run on 5 servers not 50 for cost reasons not because I'm being green. If I'm being green by accident, that's a bonus. I'm glad on the "measure" side it gives examples of how to measure (though I…
I do wonder how many kW of power things that HN generally disparages as bloated (Electron being the main one people talk about) actually adds up to versus more efficient technologies?
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Re: Principles of Green Software Engineering
#8It seems most of these boil down to: build more efficient software. Software that is more efficient with the network and CPU is also cheaper to run. So the incentives are generally aligned. When I deploy a system I want it to run on 5 servers not 50 for cost reasons not because I'm being green. If I'm being green by accident, that's a bonus. I'm glad on the "measure" side it gives examples of how to measure (though I…
I do wonder how many kW of power things that HN generally disparages as bloated (Electron being the main one people talk about) actually adds up to versus more efficient technologies?
That's a good point I didn't think of. And one that I think also applies to a lesser extent to websites. It is certainly possible to build a website that makes Chrome use a lot of CPU and network data.
I still think it applies mostly to graphics apps and things like blockchain though. As bad as electron is... would be interesting to measure it with those tools the website lists, though.
Re: Principles of Green Software Engineering
#9It seems most of these boil down to: build more efficient software. Software that is more efficient with the network and CPU is also cheaper to run. So the incentives are generally aligned. When I deploy a system I want it to run on 5 servers not 50 for cost reasons not because I'm being green. If I'm being green by accident, that's a bonus. I'm glad on the "measure" side it gives examples of how to measure (though I…
I do wonder how many kW of power things that HN generally disparages as bloated (Electron being the main one people talk about) actually adds up to versus more efficient technologies?
Tons, unsurprisingly. There are website energy calculators around.
Re: Principles of Green Software Engineering
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do wonder how many kW of power things that HN generally disparages as bloated (Electron being the main one people talk about) actually adds up to versus more efficient technologies?
That's a good point I didn't think of. And one that I think also applies to a lesser extent to websites. It is certainly possible to build a website that makes Chrome use a lot of CPU and network data. I still think it applies mostly to graphics apps and things like blockchain though. As bad as electron is... would be interesting to measure it with those tools the website lists, though.
Yeah my gut feeling is that Bitcoin alone trounces any waste caused by Electron and badly written webapps, but it'd probably still be worth measuring I think. At the very least it'd be another argument on the side of "let's not use Moore's Law as an excuse for writing inefficient software".