I don't have the direct insight to know but I'd put money on running the personalized recommendation algorithms (like a Google and Facebook do) taking a good lo

I don't have the direct insight to know but I'd put money on running the personalized recommendation algorithms (like a Google and Facebook do) taking a good lot more effort than UI / render work. Walking down the rabbit hole, we get into interesting realms when we talk about UI; there's layout compute, then actual render compute. Theatter is gonna get some on the GPU, and is intense compute, but it's done on this absurdly efficient ultra parallel highly tuned computer: the amount of compute is high but it's got all this hardware tuned specifically for rendering. There's a nearly philosophical question of how we want to regard that compute; significant if measured absolutely, small-ish if measured in the context of energy used. Keeping the page alive, loaded, scrolling is going to drain some compute. Maybe we deduct the compute required to keep the OS up, an empty app or page running? Discord the "not the workload". My understanding is that when a request comes in to Google Search and many other systems there's a often a fan out to hundreds of systems, unimaginaly many little bits of work and telemetry flying around. And then double that again for ad-buy auctions! I'd love a better resource that does better than I'm doing here, but I tend to think there's just a wild amount of work and data shuffling around as requests come in, that that's why these hyperscalers need these millions upon millions of servers.