Green Scene Hits Your Code

Since my mind is on efficiency this morning (see previous post about Facebook) I wanted to share an interesting blog posting I’ve had open in a browser for a few weeks now.  Steve Sounders, web performance guru from Google and previously Yahoo, posted some interesting thoughts on how green is your web page?

Steve did a quick mental experiment of calculating the CO2 emissions caused by bad code on a large website, he used wikipedia as his example.  I find this a bit interesting on the cyclical nature of the topic.  I might be showing my age a bit here, but back when I was a lad learning how to code up on the frozen tundra, we actually took into consideration efficiency and the cost of operations (maybe it was our proximity to Cray Research that drove this…).  I find it interesting that the green movement is causing this topic to be thought of again but in a different way.

I have been doing a little fun project like this myself at home.  A friend loaned my a device called Kill A Watz, which you plug into a power outlet and then plug other electrical devices into the Kill A Watz. The Kill A Watz then measurs how much electicity you are using on that one outlet.  It can track over time and give you the KW over a time period as well as real time watt usage.  I am using this on our home entertainment center to measure how much electricity is uses when it’s in standby mode.  Watch for a posting on that next week.  (I will give a teaser and let you know that a flat panel plasma TV uses twice the electricity when displaying a bright scene than when displaying a dark one…)