Energy Patterns for Web: An Exploratory Study

As the energy footprint generated by software is increasing at an alarming rate, understanding how to develop energy-efficient applications has become a necessity. Previous work has introduced catalogs of coding practices, also known as energy patterns. These patterns are yet limited to Mobile or third-party libraries. In this study, we focus on the Web domain—a main source of energy consumption. First we investigated whether and how Mobile energy patterns can be ported to this domain and found that 20 patterns could be ported. Then, we interviewed six expert web developers from different companies to challenge the ported patterns. Most developers expressed concerns for antipatterns, specifically with functional antipatterns, and were able to formulate guidelines to locate these patterns in the source code. Finally, to quantify the effect of Web energy patterns on energy consumption, we set up an automated pipeline to evaluate two ported patterns: ‘Dynamic Retry Delay’ (DRD) and ‘Open Only When Necessary’ (OOWN). With this, we found no evidence that the DRD pattern consumes less energy than its antipattern, while the opposite is true for OOWN. Data and Material: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8404487CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Empirical software validation.LAY ABSTRACTThe information technology sector significantly affects the climate. With our increasing online activities, from chatting to accessing medical history, software powering these services requires to be energy-efficient. Researchers in software engineering have been exploring green coding practices, or energy-specific design patterns (aka energy patterns) to make software more eco-friendly. While such energy practices have been explored for other domains including Mobile, Web applications have been somewhat overlooked, despite our daily heavy internet use. We focused on the existing energy patterns from Mobile applications to Web applications. To validate these ported energy patterns, we interviewed six professional web developers from various companies. Then, we tested some patterns to see if these energy patterns indeed save any energy. Our results showed that developers are unaware of the energy practices and some patterns did not make a noticeable difference, while others consume more energy than their counterpart. In a nutshell, our work highlights the knowledge gap between green coding research and industry and emphasize the need to understand the trade-offs in energy practices for sustainable digital future.