[matthiasb]

The recommended spec is 4 cores and 6GB. Running this 24/7 for a year in US where the carbon intensity is about 400 gCO₂eq/kWh would produce about 150kg of CO2 per user per year.

I appreciate the intent of this project, but it is not a sustainable approach.

If you are taking a couple of pictures a day, you only need to run this service for a couple of minutes per day, the rest is wasted. With Google Photos, as a SaaS, users are sharing computing power and each users are emitting less CO2.

https://engineering.teads.com/sustainability/carbon-footprin...

[callmeal]

>If you are taking a couple of pictures a day, you only need to run this service for a couple of minutes per day, the rest is wasted.

You can configure your server to sleep (scheduled or use WoL), which will halve (or more) that carbon emission number.

Speaking of which, individual action will never approach the level that corporate action could. Take a look at the practice of gas flaring (2022 estimate of ~357 million tons CO2) which is about ~45kg/person on earth. Changing flaring to capture will have a bigger impact than a minisucle fraction of the population not running a server.

But profits trump everything, so I guess we're stuck shaming individuals instead.

[matthiasb]

Turning a service on/off makes a lot of sense for this kind of application.

I sincerely didn't post my comment to shame anymore.

Need for computing is growing fast and it is actually not negligible at all. See the link below, data centers emitted 300 MTCo2 in 2020, similar to the number you mentioned.

https://www.iea.org/reports/data-centres-and-data-transmissi...

[callmeal]

> See the link below, data centers emitted 300 MTCo2 in 2020, similar to the number you mentioned.

Wow, I didn't realize there were so many datacenters. My comment about corporate action still stands though - there's no reason why companies running those data centers cannot switch to renewable sources for even a portion of their usage.

I'm no fanboy but I was impressed to see how Apple's office is 100% powered by solar (75% through rooftop, rest through an offsite farm) :

https://www.solar.com/learn/apples-new-campus-country-larges...

    According to Renewable Energy World, the campus will run entirely on renewable energy. It will generate 17 megawatts (MW) of solar on rooftops and also be supplemented by 4 megawatts of Bloom Energy fuel cells. They’re hoping that this onsite generation will cover around 75% of power requirements during working hours. The remaining energy needed will be supplied by a 130-megawatt off-site solar farm in Monterey County.

[matthiasb]

Most cloud providers already claim being carbon neutral for EU and US regions. Unfortunately, there is a lot of waste there too, so there goes the little bit of green energy we have.

[drsnow]

I don't understand how or why this defeatist, nihilistic attitude is growing in popularity. Do people just lack the self awareness to realize their inaction is tantamount to malice?

[yard2010]

Do you not understand your power and actions are so little next to these corporates to the point that it really doesn't matter? The other day I thought maybe me and my gf should merge our facebook account, you know, to save up space in facebook

[andrepd]

It's not defeatist or nihilist, it's understanding that policy and law (or an individual CEO's or politician's choice) has orders of magnitude more impact that individual actions.

[autoexec]

> I don't understand how or why this defeatist, nihilistic attitude is growing in popularity.

The attitude of "here's a simple step that will cut down your individual carbon emissions, and also please pay attention to the primary sources of the problem"? Because that attitude doesn't seem defeatist or nihilistic at all? I don't think the "profits trump everything" comment was an endorsement of that philosophy.

If I misunderstood, and you were talking about the people hiding behind the companies and industries who are destroying the environment so that they can enrich themselves at everyone's expense then I'd guess that those folks are entirely self-aware and simply don't care that they act out of malice.

It seems like they're willing to hurt anyone and destroy anything if it might grant them a little more money. I wish people would start seeing them for the threat that they are, and spent a lot more of their time thinking about what should be done about those kinds of psychopaths instead of spinning their wheels worrying about how long their computer stays awake.

inaction is bad, but wasted and misdirected action can be every bit as harmful. Focusing on the people who are consistently doing the most harm in the shortest amount of time is only logical unless people have become too defeatist to believe that anything can be done to stop the abuses of industry.

[tourmalinetaco]

So you support Bill Gates creating an uncountable amount of CO2 with his inefficient OS (not to mention ewaste from CPU limiting), but a single individual running their server for a few hours longer than you like is “tantamount to malice”? Do you even care about Earth, or do you just care about reciting capitalist talking points?

[newsclues]

Lots of money promoting climate change. Look at the anti-natalist movement.

There is a lot of money trying to nerf the world and reduce the population.

[aembleton]

If you are running the machine anyway to do other tasks like backing up and running Jellyfish then it might be worth it.

How did you get to 150kg of CO2 per user? I'm going to assume you mean each person has one instance rather than sharing an instance like a family would. So thats 375Kwh per year, which works out as drawing 42W. That seems rather high to me.

I'm hoping to try and run this on my Pi4 which idles at under 1W. You could run on a Macbook M1 which only under heavy load conumes 42W, but I doubt this is going to need consistent heavy load: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...

[bshipp]

My personal server is a 9900K with 64GB ram and normally around 35 various docker containers running on it. It's very rare to see it ever above 10% CPU utilization.

For example, I host between 5-10 minecraft servers for my kids, but they sleep while the kids aren't playing on them and only spool up when a link is requested.

A properly configured Linux box would barely need a trickle of energy when nothing is demanding its resources, so I'd guess that the estimates are likely a bit on the high side.

[robbintt]

I do this same thing with 1 server. How fo you handle requests? I used a lambda to fire up an ec2 instance but just moved to locally served.

[matthiasb]

Yes, I assumed 1 user per server. If a family shares the server, then you can divide by the number of family members.

The link I shared has the details of the calculation. The calculation assumes 50% CPU load which is most likely too high for this use case.

[tomaskafka]

I'll put this on my Celeron fanless home NAS that's running already (and sipping well below 20 watts)

[SanderNL]

Thanks for pointing out environmental considerations. These got swept under the rug for too long.

I'm not too comfortable pointing to the cloud providers for "efficiency", but you gotta go somewhere. I get that.

Personally I'm more a fan of building more efficient software (green software?). Using 6GB @ 4 cores to handle some media is a bit much IMO..

[ALittleLight]

For perspective, this is about half the CO2 that you will exhale in a year of normal breathing. For similarly useful environmental tips, try not exercising as much - wouldn't want to increase rate of exhalation!

[matthiasb]

Where did you get the carbon you exhale? Food. If you go by that logic, you might as well stop eating.

The CO2 we exhale does not contribute to climate change because it comes from plants (and indirectly animals) that captures it back.

If you burn coal to produce electricity, it releases CO2 in the atmosphere and it will take a long time to sequester that CO2 back into fossil fuel.

[whelp_24]

I am not sure this argument is correct. Animals have a carbon footprint. More importantly, it seems like control over data is a stronger concern than a such a small amount.

[alex3305]

> I appreciate the intent of this project, but it is not a sustainable approach.

Self-hosting anything isn't sustainable. Even your modem or router isn't sustainable. But having additional backups and privacy is worth something for me. However since I'm in Europe, electricity prices here are through the roof and I try to minimize power where possible. I self host Immich on my Intel Celeron J1800 NAS that uses 19.1Wh on average. I cannot run any ML stuff that it comes with though. But for me the carbon intensity should be about 250 gCO₂eq/kWh [1]. So running my NAS produces about 42 Kg of CO₂ per year for 2 users [2]. Including 10 or so additional applications besides Immich. That sounds pretty reasonable to me.

1. https://www.eea.europa.eu/ims/greenhouse-gas-emission-intens...

2. ((0,0191 * 250 * 365,25 * 24) / 1000)

[matthiasb]

What you are saying makes sense. If you are running other valuable apps, then it isn't a waste.

I am curious though, how did you come to 1.75kg per user? I calculated 20.9kg / user / year.

250/1000/1000 kgCO₂eq/Wh x 19.1 Wh x 8760 hours in a year / 2 users = 20.9 kg / user / year

[alex3305]

> What you are saying makes sense. If you are running other valuable apps, then it isn't a waste.

'Valuable' is pretty subjective though. Most of the services are for entertainment purposes. But I also host quite a few useful things such as Bitwarden and CouchDB for Obsidian Sync.

> I calculated 20.9kg / user / year.

You are right. I forgot the 24 hours in my calculation:

    (0,0191 * 250 * 365,25 * 24) / 1000

I also noticed that my comment was incorrectly formatted. I've since edited my original comment. If I factor in my complete homelab I use about 40Wh, which corresponds with about 90kg of CO₂ yearly. Which doesn't sound all that bad to me.

[sneak]

May this be the worst criticism levied against a project!

[oliwarner]

First, do you suppose it's running at full pelt 24/7? If suggest the specs are that high to speed to batch operations. Most of the time it'll be idling.

And second, letting Google or Apple manage this doesn't mean it doesn't use energy. They're offsetting or generating? So am I.

[matthiasb]

An idle server still consumes energy. Energy consumption increases with CPU load, RAM consumes the same regardless of the usage.

When Google manages your pictures, they don't have idle servers for each users. This is the main reason their service is more sustainable.

[detuur]

Honestly, that a simple file sync service needs that kind of specs is bewildering to me.

[Mashimo]

It's not a simple file sync service.

It has object and face detection. Metadata indexing / searching and multi user support.

[mordae]

Multiuser support is free, face detection is cheap enough embedded camera chips do it, metadata indexing is cheap with any recent DB engine, search is cheap with them as well.

The only computationally expensive thing here is face matching. Photoprism recommends two cores and 3G RAM and claims to be able to run on a NAS.

[Mashimo]

From other comments in this thread it seems you can run immich on a raspberry pi.

Any who, I don't consider it a simple sync service.

[pathartl]

It's not just face detection. It does some level of object detection as well.

[the_common_man]

What's bewildering is that you made this comment after going through the website. Did you even click the link? It's hardly a simple file sync service

[the_common_man]

These are for ec2 instances. Nowhere close to what low powered servers consime. Also, this is setup for a family.

[matthiasb]

I used an AWS instance with similar specs as reference. What kind of low power servers are you referring too?

[the_common_man]

Like Intel nucs or pi

[raincole]

You should write it as how much it adds to electricity bill, not in kg of CO2.

Kg of CO2 is a unit of fearmongering. And if you believe it's not, then the problem is why people are allowed to buy electricity so cheaply, not a photo-sync service.

By the way, a cow produces 120Kg of methane a year.

[xattt]

> By the way, a cow produces 120Kg of methane a year.

Thank goodness we're eating so many of them to help reduce their population.

/s