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I find the fact that anyone can speak dismissively about a 5x speedup disheartening. Has anyone ever done a study on how much CO2 we are emitting in the name of

I find the fact that anyone can speak dismissively about a 5x speedup disheartening. Has anyone ever done a study on how much CO2 we are emitting in the name of "developer productivity"?

nostrademons 9y ago
It's probably less than you think. Humans - just by virtue of existence - produce a huge amount of CO2, both through the air they breathe, the meat they eat, the automobiles they get to work in, the heavy machinery used to build those roads & buildings, the manufactured goods they consume, etc. And the CO2 cost of a developer isn't just that one developer's emissions; it's also those of all the support staff needed, from managers/admins/HR at work to the food service workers that serve them meals out to the doctors/lawyers/therapists and other service providers they visit to the parents that raised them. It's almost certain one developer generates more CO2 than any reasonable number of servers that run their code. Anything that reduces manpower costs is a net positive for emissions. Besides, when the equation changes (say, when the software enters maintenance mode but the servers stay up), they'll be a strong economic incentive to spend the developer time to rewrite it more efficiently.
- nkurz 9y ago
  It's almost certain one developer generates more CO2 than any reasonable number of servers that run their code. I'm not so sure. Let's do a back-of-the-envelope estimate. Assume a single really hefty server that consumes 1 kilowatt. Over one year, this is about 10,000 kw hr. 1 kw hr of electricity produced by a coal fired plant generates about 1 kg of CO2 (https://carbonpositivelife.com/co2-per-kwh-of-electricity/ https://carbonpositivelife.com/co2-per-kwh-of-electricity/). Thus that big server running for a year produces about 10 metric tons of CO2. An average American lifestyle (all in, total country production divided by population, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/datablog/2009/sep/02/carbon-emissions-per-person-capita https://www.theguardian.com/environment/datablog/2009/sep/02...) involves the production about about 20 tons of CO2 per year. So if you write code that full-time on more than 2 really big servers per year, your code might be producing more CO2 than the rest of your lifestyle. I'm guessing that most of the errors in this are probably overestimating the code's CO2 (probably not coal fired, probably less than 1 kw, a year is less than 10,000 hours), so more realistically maybe it's 4-8 servers to be break-even? Still, I think it's fair to say that there are some participants in this forum whose running code probably generates more CO2 than the rest of their lifestyle.
klodolph 9y ago
Something like 2% of the US power consumption goes to data centers. But think about this... how much CO2 would you spend getting developers to work every day so they can reduce CO2 somewhere else? I suspect the biggest users of DC power, in terms of code, are already written in languages like C++.

I find the fact that anyone can speak dismissively about a 5x speedup disheartening. Has anyone ever done a study on how much CO2 we are emitting in the name of "developer productivity"?

nostrademons 9y ago

It's probably less than you think. Humans - just by virtue of existence - produce a huge amount of CO2, both through the air they breathe, the meat they eat, the automobiles they get to work in, the heavy machinery used to build those roads & buildings, the manufactured goods they consume, etc. And the CO2 cost of a developer isn't just that one developer's emissions; it's also those of all the support staff needed, from managers/admins/HR at work to the food service workers that serve them meals out to the doctors/lawyers/therapists and other service providers they visit to the parents that raised them. It's almost certain one developer generates more CO2 than any reasonable number of servers that run their code. Anything that reduces manpower costs is a net positive for emissions. Besides, when the equation changes (say, when the software enters maintenance mode but the servers stay up), they'll be a strong economic incentive to spend the developer time to rewrite it more efficiently.

nkurz 9y ago
It's almost certain one developer generates more CO2 than any reasonable number of servers that run their code. I'm not so sure. Let's do a back-of-the-envelope estimate. Assume a single really hefty server that consumes 1 kilowatt. Over one year, this is about 10,000 kw hr. 1 kw hr of electricity produced by a coal fired plant generates about 1 kg of CO2 (https://carbonpositivelife.com/co2-per-kwh-of-electricity/ https://carbonpositivelife.com/co2-per-kwh-of-electricity/). Thus that big server running for a year produces about 10 metric tons of CO2. An average American lifestyle (all in, total country production divided by population, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/datablog/2009/sep/02/carbon-emissions-per-person-capita https://www.theguardian.com/environment/datablog/2009/sep/02...) involves the production about about 20 tons of CO2 per year. So if you write code that full-time on more than 2 really big servers per year, your code might be producing more CO2 than the rest of your lifestyle. I'm guessing that most of the errors in this are probably overestimating the code's CO2 (probably not coal fired, probably less than 1 kw, a year is less than 10,000 hours), so more realistically maybe it's 4-8 servers to be break-even? Still, I think it's fair to say that there are some participants in this forum whose running code probably generates more CO2 than the rest of their lifestyle.

klodolph 9y ago

Something like 2% of the US power consumption goes to data centers. But think about this... how much CO2 would you spend getting developers to work every day so they can reduce CO2 somewhere else? I suspect the biggest users of DC power, in terms of code, are already written in languages like C++.