green-coding.io

The Carbon Cost of Testing Pipelines

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

When we first created Eco-CI, our goal was to help developers get a more solid grasp of how their repeated processes cost energy and carbon, and be able to put some practical numbers to that concept. It is very easy to become detached to the reality of carbon emissions when there are many layers of abstraction and conversion, as is the case with CI processes. Often what we measure is the load on a machine (via cpu-utilization), and that gets converted to a number related to the energy pull of a server (that’s off somewhere) in Joules, and while we can then convert that to an estimation of grams of CO2 emitted, even that doesn’t feel very tangible. And the less tangible the effects of our choices are, the less likely we are to think about them and change. The goal here then is to try to solidify a connection between our CI pipeline usage and the environmental impact they have.

Energy Efficiency of programming languages - Revisiting Python in 2024

Fri, 31 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In 2017 a paper was published in the Proceedings of 2017 ACM SIGPLAN called Energy Efficiency across Programming Languages

The paper compares different programming language on standardised algorithmical compute benchmarks and ranks them according to their energy efficiency.

CO2 savings at scale - The Zoom Auto-Download case

Sat, 10 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Many people often critique Green Coding with two main points:

They believe the savings are insignificant, arguing that IT systems are already efficient.
They find the methods and modifications required for Green Coding challenging and time-consuming to implement.

However, despite these views being grounded in common software development experiences, they frequently do not hold true.

CPU Power Capping - Processor energy configuration series - Part 3

Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This arcticle is part of a multi-part series. Be sure to check out / stay tuned for the other parts! In this series we look at processor configuration options either from the OS side or directly in MSRs of the CPU and their effect on the power draw of the CPU.

Inherent variability in energy testing of CI pipelines

Sun, 03 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

As we’ve been testing the energy use of various CI pipelines using Eco-CI, one thing we’ve noticed is that there is a large amount of variability in the results. Pipeline runs that we would expect to be more or less the same (same commit hash, running a few days in a row on the same cpu) can have wildly different results:

CPU Utilization - A useful metric?

Mon, 26 Jun 2023 11:00:00 +0000

In this case study we will look at the ubiquitous metric CPU utilization and how helpful it is in evaluating code performance or energy consumption

Turbo Boost and energy - Processor energy configuration series - Part 2

Thu, 02 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Turning ON deep c-states. This might increase startup-latency of some workloads, but since Cores can not only go into one fixed Turbo Boost frequency, but actually if only SOME cores go into a stronger Turbo Boost, then they can reach even higher frequencies! So if you have a workload that is single or low-threaded you can profit from extraordinary high frequencies that you might never see when all cores are always running on higher frequencies.
- Source: https://www.vmware.com/explore/video-library/video-landing.html?sessionid=1686331461690001FeTn&videoId=6340661293112

DevOps energy savings - Reducing image docker container size - Part I

Mon, 27 Feb 2023 10:00:00 +0000

What are the tradeoffs when trying to optimize image size of docker containers

RAPL, SGX and energy filtering - Influences on power consumption

Tue, 06 Dec 2022 08:00:00 +0000

In this case study we will look at the RAPL feature in modern processors and a security feature that can influence it’s accuracy

Hyper-Threading and energy - Processor energy configuration series - Part 1

Thu, 06 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Wordpress vs. Hugo + Cloudflare

Thu, 28 Jul 2022 08:00:00 +0000

In this case study we will look the carbon benefit of a static site compared to a Wordpress site. To get a more fair picture we will also include the HUGO build process and reason a bit about a possible hosting optimization.

Does gzip save CO2?

Sat, 16 Jul 2022 08:00:00 +0000

Looking at gzip compression and if it really saves carbon emissions

AVIF vs. PNG

Fri, 01 Jul 2022 08:00:00 +0000

In this case study we will look at image compression with the AVIF format. Typically when trying to optimize a website for network resource consumption and thus CO2 emission images are the lowest hanging fruit.