Will HTTP/2.0 be green ?

In the discussion about compression, and for that matter
encryption, we need to talk a bit about greenhouse gasses.

Any one microsecond, any one kilobyte of extra per-hop cost per
HTTP request, is going to scale into remarkable amounts of greenhouse
gasses by the time it is scaled up across the WWW.

Ideally, we should be able to show that processing the same
workload with HTTP/2.0 takes no more energy than with HTTP/1.1,
and preferably less.

A small power increment for significant performance gains can
probably be "sold" with some hand-waving.

Having HTTP/2.0 use significantly more energy than HTTP/1.1
would make the protocol a non-starter.  Just imagine the
gleeful CS/EE student papers and resulting headlines.

Poul-Henning

PS:  Speaking from a lot of experience, the most manageable way to
measure power consumption realtive to workload is to use really
small computers, RasberryPI, BeagleBone, Soekris etc. where the
measurements can be done on the low voltage DC supply.

If anybody wants to persue this, I'll be happy to help out.

Drop me email.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk@FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.

Received on Sunday, 1 June 2014 20:00:38 UTC