The cost of a source based package system
Stefan Schaeckeler
schaecsn at gmx.net
Thu Sep 8 05:20:10 UTC 2011
Hi all, please don't take this posting too serious. I was just curious ...
Just the other day, I bought a kill-a-watt. Among other things, I measured the "cost of a source based package system", i.e. I was comparing the energy cost of installing ports from source vs binary packages (setup, see below).
Case 1: Source based installation
Time: 7 hours, 3 min
Energy: 0.489 kw*h
Price: 4.89 US cent
Case 2a: Binary packages based installation
Time: 1 hour, 57 min
Energy: 0.079 kw*h
Price: 0.79 US cent
If the computer is constantly running, then we should add the installation time of case 1 to case 2a:
Case 2b: Binary packages based installation
Time: 7 hours, 3 min
Energy: (40/1000)kw*(7.05-1.95)h + 0.079 kw*h = 0.283 kw*h
Price: 2.83 US cent
Using source based ports is with almost 5 US cents 6.19 times (case 1 vs case 2a) or 1.73 times (case 1 vs case 2b) more expensive than using binary packages :)
- Stefan
Details:
Price: 1 kw*h = 10 US cent.
Kill-a-Watt trick: by setting the price per kw to $9.999 (= $10), I could get one more digit of accuracy for the consumed energy by dividing the price by 10.
HW: Sony vaio pcg-k23 laptop (pentium 4, 2,8 GHz, huge display). Booted into FreeBSD, it consumes around 40 Watt ("idle"). When compiling programs, the power consumption doubles to somewhat above 80 Watt. Internet connection 768kb/s.
SW: Installed 259 ports via this script:
--- snip ---
date
for i in /usr/ports/x11/xorg-minimal\
/usr/ports/x11/xorg-apps\
/usr/ports/x11/xorg-cf-files\
/usr/ports/x11/xorg-docs\
/usr/ports/x11/xorg-libraries\
/usr/ports/shells/bash3\
/usr/ports/print/teTeX\
/usr/ports/editors/emacs\
/usr/ports/editors/joe2\
/usr/ports/multimedia/xmms\
/usr/ports/multimedia/ffmpeg\
/usr/ports/lang/clisp\
/usr/ports/lang/hugs\
/usr/ports/lang/swi-pl\
/usr/ports/lang/llvm-gcc4\
/usr/ports/lang/gnat\
/usr/ports/lang/Gofer\
/usr/ports/x11-toolkits/tk86
do
cd $i && yes o | make install clean
done
date
halt -p
--- snip ---
Similarly, 246 binary packages have been installed via pkg_add -r.
pkg_delete /var/db/pkg/*
rm -rf /usr/ports/distfiles/
PACKAGESITE=ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-8-stable/Latest/
export PACKAGESITE
--- snip ---
date
for i in xorg-minimal\
xorg-apps\
xorg-cf-files\
xorg-docs\
xorg-libraries\
bash3\
teTeX\
emacs\
joe2\
xmms\
ffmpeg\
clisp\
hugs\
swi-pl\
llvm-gcc4\
gnat\
Gofer\
tk86
do
pkg_add -r $i
done
date
halt -p
--- snip ---
The number of ports and binary packages varies slightly. I don't know why. This only introduces a small error.
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