I am attempting to index a large amount of data from a website and the last thing I want to do is DoS it accidentally. To prevent this, I was planning on doing it at night since it is not an international website.
But if they throttle server performance when not used, this would be a problem.
Is throttling server performance ever used by companies to conserve power?
Is throttling server performance ever used by companies to conserve power?
Actually that is done all the time: all modern systems use power management und dynamic clock control to conserve power and reduce cooling.
However, this is a dynamic process, controlled by processing demand. As soon as there's processing demand the clock ramps up, so you'll barely be able to measure the tiny bit of latency that causes (in the order of microseconds).
In practice, you can completely ignore power management.
(I've simplified somewhat - in reality it's a bit more complicated factoring in processing demand, temperatures, thermal envelope, power budget, at even more details.)
Ask the organization hosting this data that you would like to download a significant amount of it, and how to proceed.
They may accommodate you, such as by generating archives to download, setting guidelines on requests per second and which hours of the day are best, or granting a bypass of rate limiting. Or, they might deny your request, including on non technical reasons like this being against their intended use of the service.
Performance issues you might cause could be any number of things. Perhaps the database was not sized for a large number of requests. Or their bandwidth is limited. Power saving mode might make response time slightly slower, but perhaps not enough to make it a denial of service.
