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Climate-friendly software: don't fight the wrong battle

Thomas Broyer on May 01, 2023

When talking about software ecodesign, green IT, climate-friendly software, the carbon footprint of software, or however you name it, most of the t...
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Thomas Broyer

Thanks for your comment.

The note about "concentrating on energy efficiency is misguided" (your words) in the introduction is about server-side energy efficiency. Of course you do have to make your client side (web app, native app) energy efficient:

As part of performance testing, have a look at electricity use, as it will both be directly associated with emissions to produce that electricity, and be perceptible by the user (battery drain).
[…]

Optimize for the perceived performance and battery life.

Could it be the word “first” in the “Pick servers in carbon-neutral or low-carbon datacenters first, then optimize your architecture and code” pullout that made you think I was kind of dismissing the rest? Maybe I should rephrase that… My point rather was: if you care, start by doing that; there's no point investing time in all the rest when you have that relatively easily attainable low-hanging fruit, so that should probably be your first action.

 
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Thomas Broyer • Edited

Actually, I had thought about writing “energy efficiency and/of server-side code” but found it harder to read; the idea was to convey “energy efficiency of server-side code, and server-side code” (for the other things like optimizing for speed). I went for the simpler wording as this was just the introduction and I would touch about energy efficiency later on anyway 🤷

Wrt network usage: it does have an impact, but (to my knowledge) more on the client device than on the network infrastructure. A bigger impact probably of not containing our usage of the network is to push it too far so bigger infrastructure has to be deployed.