Energy consumption of web servers: A comparison between dynamic and static approaches

Details

Supervisors

Barbette, Tom

Faculty

Ecole polytechnique de Louvain

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences informatiques, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

enThe growing uses of digital services have led to an increasing concerns regarding the environmental impact, most notably the energy usage, of web hosting. This thesis examines the energy efficiency of different web hosting approaches (static, dynamic, and cached) for different applications using WordPress and Flask-based sites hosted on Apache and Nginx servers, as well as a new approach to build a static version of flask based application on database change. Four test cases were compared, a basic WordPress application and a flask blogging application, one with only get requests, one comparison with the use of post request and one last comparison with authentication. The results are that static implementations always use the least amount of energy and provide the highest throughput. Cached copies offer a good option if static deployment is not possible, but their performance falls when there is increased user activity, i.e., sending POST requests or user authentication. Rebuilding the website upon each database change is a viable approach when fast content updates are required and the frequency of updates is low. However, in scenarios with frequent data modifications, this strategy results in higher energy consumption compared to a dynamic website. Nginx showed to have better power performance compared to Apache and could achieve a higher maximum request per second. These findings illustrate the importance of selecting good host strategies and server settings for energy-saving web applications.