I mean, I totally agree that we should optimize our websites so as not to waste money and resources, but to use global warming as motivation? A couple servers sitting in an office will not affect global warming, and removing them will not stop it. I don’t care how you do the math, stop and use some common sense for a secon. These little things don’t matter. You aren’t going to stop global warming, especially not with a website. You could stop using any kind of electricity for a year and it would do absolutely nothing.

I personally believe the whole “global warming” commotion is crap. Even if we could stop it, we would have to tackle it on a national level, and even then, countries like China are emitting a lot more than the US.

I would tend to think that optimizing websites (for carbon emissions reasons) has bugger all benefit to the environment.

I can see it now, type in http://www.google.com and search for something, you then get a pop up saying: “You’re request could not be completed, you have exceeded your daily emission rating for internet usage. Please try again after 24 hours”

(fascinating article though) :-)

Assume one web server can handle 100 of these requests/second, or 8.6M requests/day. that’s six web servers running full tilt year-round to handle this traffic.

So yes, being efficient (in this case with caching) results in less servers, faster response times, and therefore money savings — lower bandwidth means fewer servers, and fewer servers means fewer admins.
.
As for your CO2 trolling, producing energy can pollute in many other ways: material costs, mining and erosion damage, nuclear waste… too many to list. So it’s always better to be efficient.

Your proposal might be fruitful if it was framed as a more productive alternative (less servers, fewer server admins, less complexity, faster response times).

That and CO2 being a pollutant is a farce.

People have, seriously, advanced this idea before. Besides the fact that it’s completely ridiculous, black backgrounds consume more energy on LCDs anyway.

People, environmentalism isn’t about expending vast resources making basically immeasurable improvements to resource usage in a context of utterly unacceptable resource usage overall. Ending the rape of the planet is going to require huge, tremendous, world-changing systematic changes to the way humans operate—not just in their own personal lifestyles, but culturally and economically. Most of the environmental problems we face are not lifestyle issues in the first place: they’re either cultural (assumptions about scarcity and about things like limitless growth) or commercial.

In terms of measurable improvements, if we are to keep computers around at all, they’d need to be manufactured using only already-mined (low-energy recycled) materials and be able to rely only on solar power. And we’d have to find ways to reuse existing devices, rather than throwing them away or “recycling” them (which, basically, amounts to throwing them away in dumps in Asia instead of in the US).

To start with count the number of times the word “Assume” is used.

Secondly the CPU cycles serving http requests are going to be dwarfed by the CPU of the database queries.

Thirdly the web site is penalised for the number of users, they need to take the average number of http requests across all pages not multiply the front page by number of users.

Fourthly it assumes constant efficiency in terms of both power and CPU across wildly disparate hardware / and software platforms. Does windows / IIS on commodity hardware consume more power serving a http request than apache running on a pSeries? The answer is very probably.

Its obvious as the number of requests goes up, the number of servers required goes up and the carbon footprint / energy consumption will go up but there is no assumption that it will necesarily follow a strictly proportional relationship, and there is no way to even roughly determine the magnitude of power / carbon used.