3 ms·

>energy [is] a tiny fraction of the cost of dev time I think that is in a lot of cases not true, just that the developer (and his company) is not paying the bi

>energy [is] a tiny fraction of the cost of dev time I think that is in a lot of cases not true, just that the developer (and his company) is not paying the bill but the buyer/user. While individually this might not be a lot, therefore the individual will not complain about it either, for applications with lot of users it will add up a lot. Let's say you have a application or a device with 1 Million Concurrent users, and you could reduce the power consumption by just 1 Watt per instance, this amounts to nearly 9000 MWh yearly, which as a total cost for end users in germany would amount to more than 2,5 Million Euro (+ the climate emissions). I am quite sure that in a lot of instances you could reduce the power usage by 1 Watt and that it would cost less than even 10% of the aggregated savings. Even simple things like game menu screens having no frame limiters and putting the GPU under heavy load have been a thing in the past (e.g. Diablo3 at some point). The issue is that the developer has no incentive to improve such things, except in the most extreme cases as he doesn't benefit from it but from a macro-economic and ecological perspective it would be beneficial.

ashelmire 8y ago
Let's be clear about this: high level languages like python and ruby in production use are doing server side web operations, most of which aren't even very intensive - the assertion that this is being offloaded to the user is false. Anything that a low level language would replace is server side. A Java web app still needs to serve the same javascript that a Ruby or Python app does. Javascript is used client side, and again, it's quite fast, with performance comparable to Java and C++ in most use cases. And a web app is basically never going to reach the cpu/gpu levels that even the lightest game coded in C++ will reach, with rare exceptions.

ashelmire 8y ago

Let's be clear about this: high level languages like python and ruby in production use are doing server side web operations, most of which aren't even very intensive - the assertion that this is being offloaded to the user is false. Anything that a low level language would replace is server side. A Java web app still needs to serve the same javascript that a Ruby or Python app does. Javascript is used client side, and again, it's quite fast, with performance comparable to Java and C++ in most use cases. And a web app is basically never going to reach the cpu/gpu levels that even the lightest game coded in C++ will reach, with rare exceptions.