3 ms·

You know, if you wanted to improve carbon footprint, a better place to look might be at software bloat. The sheer number of times things get encoded and decoded

You know, if you wanted to improve carbon footprint, a better place to look might be at software bloat. The sheer number of times things get encoded and decoded to text is mind boggling. Especially in "typical node, Java loads".

tyingq 4y ago
Logging and Cybersecurity are bloaty areas as well. I've seen plenty of AWS cost breakdowns where the cybersec functions were the highest percentage of spend. Or desktops where carbon black, or windows defender were using most of the CPU or IO cycles. And networks where syslog traffic was the biggest percentage of traffic.
- orangepurple 4y ago
  Norton, Symantec, and McAfee contribute greatly to global warming in the financial services sector. At least half of CPU cycles on employee laptops are devoted to them.
  - Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    But do they actually work? For years I've been of the opinion that most anti-virus solutions don't actually stop virusses, instead they give you a false sense of security and their messaging is intentionally alarmist to make individuals and organizations pay their subscription fees. In my limited and sheltered experience, the only viruses I've gotten in the past decade or so was from dodgy pirated stuff or big "download" button ads on download sites.
    - MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
      At best they don’t work, in reality they are an attack vector themselves and a performance nightmare. They should (mostly) not exist.
  - MaxBarraclough 4y ago
    Presumably then they're knocking hours off the laptops' battery lives?
- Dunedan 4y ago
  As AWS doesn't price services based on carbon footprint, you can't infer the carbon footprint from the cost. I agree however that certain AWS services are disproportional expensive.
  - maxerickson 4y ago
    Presumably the price provides some sort of bounds. (Unless they are doing something like putting profits towards some sort of carbon maximization scheme)
    - tyingq 4y ago
      Well and a fair amount of cybersec oriented services are a pattern of "sniff and copy every bit of data and do something with it" or "trawl all state". Which is inherently heavy.
ip26 4y ago
This has been looked at; the electricity savings of more efficient programming are too small to be worth it with a fixed compute capacity. However, if you can reduce the amount of machines or machine-time you require, that can become material.

tyingq 4y ago

Logging and Cybersecurity are bloaty areas as well. I've seen plenty of AWS cost breakdowns where the cybersec functions were the highest percentage of spend. Or desktops where carbon black, or windows defender were using most of the CPU or IO cycles. And networks where syslog traffic was the biggest percentage of traffic.

orangepurple 4y ago
Norton, Symantec, and McAfee contribute greatly to global warming in the financial services sector. At least half of CPU cycles on employee laptops are devoted to them.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  But do they actually work? For years I've been of the opinion that most anti-virus solutions don't actually stop virusses, instead they give you a false sense of security and their messaging is intentionally alarmist to make individuals and organizations pay their subscription fees. In my limited and sheltered experience, the only viruses I've gotten in the past decade or so was from dodgy pirated stuff or big "download" button ads on download sites.
  - MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
    At best they don’t work, in reality they are an attack vector themselves and a performance nightmare. They should (mostly) not exist.
- MaxBarraclough 4y ago
  Presumably then they're knocking hours off the laptops' battery lives?
Dunedan 4y ago
As AWS doesn't price services based on carbon footprint, you can't infer the carbon footprint from the cost. I agree however that certain AWS services are disproportional expensive.
- maxerickson 4y ago
  Presumably the price provides some sort of bounds. (Unless they are doing something like putting profits towards some sort of carbon maximization scheme)
  - tyingq 4y ago
    Well and a fair amount of cybersec oriented services are a pattern of "sniff and copy every bit of data and do something with it" or "trawl all state". Which is inherently heavy.

ip26 4y ago

This has been looked at; the electricity savings of more efficient programming are too small to be worth it with a fixed compute capacity. However, if you can reduce the amount of machines or machine-time you require, that can become material.