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Not the same thing. The energy consumed by your home scales (roughly) linearly with usage. The energy consumed by a computer does not scale linearly with the
by aneesh 18y ago
Not the same thing.
The energy consumed by your home scales (roughly) linearly with usage. The energy consumed by a computer does not scale linearly with the number of http requests -- most of the energy is just to keep the machine up & running, with a minimal additional cost per request.
- puzzle-out 18y agoBut more searches requires more servers in the first place.
- aneesh 18y agoYes, but it's not linear. It looks more like a "step function." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Step_function http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Step_function) If you currently use a heater for 1 hour/day at home, and then you turn it up to 2 hours/day, you do need about twice as much energy to power that heater as before. However, if I make 100 additional requests today, Google doesn't need a new server. If everyone in the world makes 1% more requests, Google doesn't need a new server. So to try to calculate the cost of me doing one additional search is perhaps slightly misleading. I'm not saying there is no cost. I'm just saying that the cost is incurred in chunks, and not "per request".