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by nonbel
2882 days ago
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>"you can't assume that power usage scales anywhere close to linearly with data usage." As noted in the original post, its based on 5 kWh per GB of data transferred as described here:
https://aceee.org/files/proceedings/2012/data/papers/0193-00... If you have a better method, I'd love to see it. This is back of the napkin stuff, it doesnt need to be perfect. And using he same methods, HN is ~70 KB which is decent for a text-content site. The OP wired page is about 700 KB (but wired.com is 4.3 MB), slashdot is ~1.9 MB, and reddit now like 4.3 MB, etc. Pretty much the entire internet is over 90% unnecessary junk at this point even if you allow that the content has value. |
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It doesn't need to be perfect, but if the result is off by an order of magnitude or more than it's pretty useless.
If you have a better method, I'd love to see it.
I'm not saying I have a better way of answering the same question, but that doesn't make your analysis more valid.
As noted in the original post, its based on 5 kWh per GB of data transferred
Yes, I believe that if you take the entire amount of data transferred by the Internet, then divide it by the total amount of power used by all internet-connected devices, then you get 5 kWh per GB (or at least you do if you base it off of the data available in 2012 when that paper was written). But that doesn't mean that if I download an extra GB of data that it took anywhere near 5 kWh to do that.
That paper you linked includes things like "total power consumed by all connected desktop computers" as part of the power budget, but this is obviously flawed reasoning. There are many things that computers do besides transferring data, and even if a computer is sitting idle it consumes a good deal of power as long as it's switched on. If I spend 1 kWh of electricity playing an offline computer game for an hour, then download a 1kB file, that doesn't mean that it costs me 1kWh/kB to download data.