Energy Efficiency in Web Development: Investigation of the Power Consumption of a Web Application with Different Load Distribution

Almost all products, systems and activities leave an ecological footprint. For this reason, sustainability has become a central requirement of today's world. To date, this applies to software products only to a lesser extent. Nevertheless, recent developments such as the introduction of the Blue Angel as a label for energy- and resource-efficient software are continuously drawing more attention to this issue. One focus of research on this topic is the energy efficiency of these applications. Since software is used in different areas in many different architectures, a variety of factors influencing the respective power consumption are conceivable. Client-server architectures offer a special application case. Not only can the implementation of the algorithms influence the power consumption, but also the location where the computations are executed. This paper therefore investigates the influence of different load distributions on the energy efficiency of these architectures. The results obtained suggest that sometimes serious differences arise due to different calculation locations. These differences are due to multiple factors. Knowledge about this not only enables a more accurate assessment of the energy efficiency of web applications, but can also serve as a principle of sustainable web development and help developers to reduce the ecological footprint of their applications.