Author Archives: Christian Schwind

Habe geraden einen lustigen Artikel zum Thema Flash bei Twitter gefunden!

Greenpeace, shame on you. Your new fund raising site is wasting more precious energy than it needs to! How could you create your new fund raising campaign for the next Rainbow Warrior (http://anewwarrior.greenpeace.org) using technology that is so blatantly disrespectful of the environment? By my estimates and calculation your fund-raising site could easily waste the equivalency of 18 years of electric power required by a single houshold, i.e. almost 39.000 kWh.

Greenpeace, you can be very quick to judge companies on their use of technology and resources, but what about your own choice: you have chosen to implement your new campaign using Adobe Flash instead of plain old HTML and JavaScript. Why is that such a bad choice? Because it results in a huge amount of wasted electric power that is absolutely not necessary.

Let me explain

The total power consumption of a computer depends on a couple of variables. One important being the processing power required by the software that is running. The processing power is commonly expressed as a percentage of the total processing power of CPU (the core processing unit, which is the part of the computer that actually runs the software). Some software (and tasks) inevitably require a high percentage of the CPU‘s total processing power. Some don‘t. Software that requires a higher percentage will result in a higher total power consumption of the computer. So, basically, software that uses more CPU power harms the environment more than software that requires less CPU power.

So how much processing power does a normal web-page consume? Let‘s take the homepage of Greenpeace.org as an example: the main page uses less than 1% of the CPU on my computer, which has a fairly common CPU (technical details can be found at the end of this post).

Compare this to the fund raising site for a new Rainbow Warrior at http://anewwarrior.greenpeace.org: is uses round about 120% of my CPU (when showing the main page that comes right after the introductory movie trailer and not doing anything else).

How much wasted electricity?

That is not so easy to answer. I have tried to measure the relative additional power consumption (again: see the end of this post for details on how I did this) by using my computer‘s built-in tools. The result: