[Foundation-l] Wikimedia and Environment

[William Pietri]

On 12/12/2009 08:32 AM, Teofilo wrote:
> Do we have an idea of the energy consumption related to the online
> access to a Wikipedia article ? Some people say that a few minutes
> long search on a search engine costs as much energy as boiling water
> for a cup of tea : is that story true in the case of Wikipedia (4) ?
>    

I don't have time to do the math right now, but I believe this could be 
estimated from publicly available data. You'd take the pageview numbers:

http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportRequests.htm

You'd look up our various servers:

http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Main_Page

And then make some reasonable guesses as to actual power consumption. 
(Sysadmins often measure this, so I'm sure some Googling would turn up 
good approximations.) Divide one number by the other and you've got a 
reasonably good guess at power usage per pageview.

You could take that a step farther by looking up the power composition 
where the server farms are and estimating CO2 output.

If anybody tries to do this and gets stuck, drop me a line.

William