https://www.rvo.nl/onderwerpen/energie-besparen-de-industrie...
If I rent a server I want to be able to run it to the maximum capacity, since I'm paying for all of it. It's dishonest to make me pay for X and give me < X. Idle CPU is wasted money.
The flip side is that the provider should be also offering more climate friendly, lower power options. I'll still want to run them to the max, but the total energy consumed would be less than before.
Also not forgetting that code efficiency matters if we want to get the max results for the minimum carbon spend. Another reason why giant web frameworks and bloated OSes depress me a little.
* Data centers in the Netherlands use approx. 2% of nationwide electricity production (4% in the US [2])
* Data center electricity usage is nearly constant, while access patterns aren’t
* Even heavily used servers spend 1/3 of power usage on idle cycles, 99% for the most lightly used servers
* Power-saving modes save approx. 10% of electricity without affecting application performance
* Many respondents do not use power-saving modes because of a lack of knowledge, because they fear the consequences, or because they have been instructed not to by their sysadmin/vendor
* Nonetheless, latency-sensitive applications (e.g. HPC or HFT) are not well-suited to power-saving modes
Given these results, it seems sensible to use power-saving modes by default, unless your workload is extremely latency-sensitive.
In any case, I disagree that potential 10% electricity savings across the worldwide data center industry, without affecting application performance, are ‘environmentalism at any cost’.
[1, Dutch] Harryvan, D. et al. (2020). Analyse LEAP Track 1 “Powermanagement.” Rijksdienst voor Ondernemend Nederland. URL: https://www.rvo.nl/sites/default/files/2021/01/Rapport%20LEA...
[1, English] Harryvan, D. et al. (2021). Analysis LEAP Track 1 “Powermanagement.” Netherlands Enterprise Agency. URL: https://www.rvo.nl/sites/default/files/2021/01/Rapport%20LEA...
[2] Shehabi, A. et al. (2024) United States Data Center Energy Usage Report (page 5). Berkeley Lab. URL: https://eta-publications.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12...
