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Do you know about a tool monitoring the ecological impact of an HTTP request as APM tools does for response time, memory consumption, ... ?

I assume such tool would need to know a few parameters : what’s the servers hardware, what’s the source of the electricity he use, is the warm generated to cool it down reuse for another purpose, ...

I’ve recently read an article (http://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/) about how careless we became in our development practices regarding performance. It stroke me that this lack of care should have an impact on the ecological environment. I’d like to mesure my impact and the one of the companies I’m working for.

Thanks !

olaurendeau
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Do you know about a tool measuring the ecological impact of a CLI, a website, a mobile app, ... ?

In general you cannot do that. Your application software is written to run under some operating system (above several kind of hardware).

The same binary executable can run (e.g. with Linux) on a AMD 2990 processor (with a TR4 motherboard) and on a cheap ITX motherboard on Celeron J4005 processor. It will behave differently and consume energy differently on both.

What you might want is to query your system for energy consumption. How that is possible depends on the operating system and on the hardware (e.g. many motherboards don't even have the hardware to probe their energy consumption). Read more about xsensors on Linux.

What you could try is to lower the frequency of your CPU to decrease energy consumption. How that is possible depends on the model of the CPU and of the motherboard.

BTW, most of the energy consumed might be outside of your motherboard (networking, etc...). You don't have much control on that.

However, you may want to develop efficient applications, and you might prefer using compiled language implementations (e.g. Rust, Go, C++, Ocaml) to interpreted ones (e.g. PHP or Python).

Basile Starynkevitch
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  • Thanks for your answer Basile. For website monitoring tools are able to give the memory and CPU consumption of a given HTTP query, I thought it should be possible to deduce an approximated « ecological footprint » from those consumption crossed with static metrics regarding the server hardware, OS, power origin, ... – olaurendeau Oct 20 '18 at 07:29
  • I guess you might ask your datacenter to give you real time power consumption measures. But that probably won't be cheap. – Basile Starynkevitch Oct 20 '18 at 07:33