'Slow Internet,' the next green trend?

The "slow food" movement came first, followed by "slow work" and even "slow medicine." Next, will people let the Internet relax a little for the sake of ecological sustainability?

Researchers are finding that data centers can make relatively simple power consumption tweaks that mimic those long available for personal computers, as New Scientist reports.

Energy-saving settings take several clicks to set up on Windows or Mac personal computers. But at data centers, where power consumption counts on a grander scale, equipment is often left on even when dormant.

Data centers' emissions of global warming gases exceed those of Argentina and the Netherlands combined, according to an April study by McKinsey & Co. and the Uptime Institute.

However, research from labs at Intel and the University of California at Berkeley has found that network hardware could consume up to 80 percent less energy if allowed to sleep, or if set up for data to travel in clusters rather than in an even flow. Changes to delay the flow of data by milliseconds, not enough for Web surfers to notice, reportedly cut energy use in half.

And in tests with Windows Live Messenger chatting software, Microsoft cut energy use by one-third by clustering active network connections rather than spreading them evenly across servers, noted New Scientist.

[MadLyb]

Then I guess Comcast has been green for years. ;^)

[JoeTrumpet]

I second that comment: Comcast seems to routinely slow down my Internet considerably during certain hours, and it sometimes just stops working altogether. Perhaps this is their way of helping the environment: for that, I salute them and will forgive them if I miss something crucial online.<br /><br />All kidding aside, I hope that becomes a new industry trend, and I can't see why it wouldn't: saving costs on energy should be enough of an incentive to businesses, even those who aren't looking for the bonus points from appearing greener.

[forensicmeteoboy]

Clusters? I thought the internet already worked like that... data coming in packets? I'm confused.<br /><br />I'm all for letting servers sleep and shut down during non-peak times. How about having High Schools do that, too? At my High School they would leave every single computer on (or at the most, sleeping) so they could run updates once a month overnight to all the computers. I think that's a little useless and wasteful.

[Dango517]

I'd like to see the net work better not slower much energy is being used in redundant tasked brought about by system glitches and bugs. Poorly designed hardware also costs use energy, time and money. Power Supply efficiencies should improve too above 85%. Heat is an indication of wasted energy. Faster system scans would reduce energy demand. Faster connectivity means less energy wasted, waiting and our time as well. When we wait, we waste energy.

[Commander_Spock]

This article has stated in part; "The "slow food" movement came first, followed by "slow work" and even "slow medicine." Next, will people let the Internet relax a little for the sake of ecological sustainability?...; but, it has apparently left out "slower aeroplane travel"! ;-)

[Lee in San Diego]

"but, it has apparently left out "slower aeroplane travel!"<br /><br />There has been several stories in the media over the last week or so about some of the airlines flying their aircraft slower to save fuel costs.<br /><br />Anyway, I am driving a lot less these days, consolidating trips, walking to the market, but when I do drive I have slowed down a bit below the posted speed limit. So if you see a middle-aged guy driving slow, and with the turn signal on when I am not changing lanes, that would be me :)

[taphilo]

What the article should have used was the CPU speed slowdown analogy from laptops. <br />In laptops you can tell the CPU to run slower when no A/C power is on (Intel SpeedStep® i believe) and thus extend battery life. When the laptop CPU use gets too high then it switches to a higher speed and of course power consumption goes up.<br />What the idea is in data centers is that after so many seconds of non-high intensity use the switches change from like a Gigabit backbone speed to 100 megabit speed thus use less power. If incoming traffic exceeds a threshold of packets then it switches back to the Gigabit and operates at that speed.<br />This allows it to be running in a slower mode while still moving traffic still but using less power. The packet delay at being switched is not noticeable to people with 15 hops - but cumulative power savings would be large.<br />Tom Philo<br /><a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.taphilo.com" target="_newWindow">http://www.taphilo.com</a>

[krosavcheg]

&gt;&gt; but, it has apparently left out "slower aeroplane travel"! ;-)<br />Google news from last couple of days. There was an article talking about some major airlines slowing planes down a few minutes to save significantly on fuel use. Can't slow down too much, though, obviously.

[pugster]

The problem is that according to the IEEE standard, there's no 'seamless' link where you can change 1gig to 100mb without loosing your connection. However in doing so, that would mean that network cards and network switches has to adhere to that standard also.

[inetdog]

I think that was just an analogy not meant to be taken literally. <br /><br />The same desireable effect can be gotten by changing the network usage patterns of the client role and server role players in each connection. Another analogy which might be better would be to think of a program interface which processes incoming communications by getting an interrupt/callback from a network driver. If the application sucks in all of the available characters and then goes away to process them, only to be interrupted again as more characters come in, there will be a lot of context switching overhead. But if the interrupt comes after the entire message has been received, there will be only one context switch. <br />The situation referrred to here is more a matter of processing entire packets than characters within a single message, but it may be a useful analogy on why delaying some network traffic so that it travels in bunches makes sense.

[inetdog]

I think that was just an analogy not meant to be taken literally. <br /><br />The same desireable effect can be gotten by changing the network usage patterns of the client role and server role players in each connection. Another analogy which might be better would be to think of a program interface which processes incoming communications by getting an interrupt/callback from a network driver. If the application sucks in all of the available characters and then goes away to process them, only to be interrupted again as more characters come in, there will be a lot of context switching overhead. But if the interrupt comes after the entire message has been received, there will be only one context switch. <br />The situation referrred to here is more a matter of processing entire packets than characters within a single message, but it may be a useful analogy on why delaying some network traffic so that it travels in bunches makes sense.