Re: [Userops] Why is it hard to move from one machine to another? An analysis.

[Elena ``of Valhalla'']

On 2015-04-09 at 20:14:16 -0400, Dave Crossland wrote:
> > Even worse, that model wastes energy at a spectacular rate.
> (Sure, its industrial scale so it uses a lot of energy. Running things at a
> personal scale necessarily can't use much. But, the economies of scale mean
> I suspect its not actually more wasteful watt for cpu cycle than your mini
> pc, plus, acmecorp's solar/dam powered datacenter in the desert/forest is
> greener than your mini pc powered by the utility grid which runs on
> coal/gas/nuclear.

using watt per cpu cycle works best when you can optimize your hardware 
so that the minimum amount of cycles are wasted, and this is easier when 
your workload is high enough to require most of the resources of one or
more servers, most of the time.

On a home server, you are likely to have limited requirements and lots
of unused cycles, so minimizing total energy per device may be the right 
strategy, expecially when only one low-powered server-ish device is 
basically enought for the needs of the whole home and having more
powerful device would just mean more wasted power.

Of course, the economy of scale works in favour of power consumptions 
of big datacenters, but for certain kinds of data they are just not a
valid alternative.

-- 
Elena ``of Valhalla''