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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

If the effect is minute enough, you might be using more net energy thinking about this, typing this comment, discussing it with others and optimizing your final png than actual energy saved for your users.

Feel-good savings are not helpful. You can do it but let's not pretend. Reminds me of an ex girlfriend that would account for coins she found on the ground in her monthly budget...

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> Reminds me of an ex girlfriend that would account for coins she found on the ground in her monthly budget...

Where do you find enough coins on the ground for that? I haven't come across any in my entire life.

Have you looked?

You don't, that was kinda my point :) she'd find maybe 1 eur a month if lucky.

I assume they mean minute relative to cars or something, not minute in an absolute sense.

Just as a sort of thought about this, if the entire web moved to brotli over gzip, or if we introduced an even better compression algorithm that was widely distributed across the internet, what would that impact me? A 5% reduction in CPU usage for every computer loading every page? I'd be curious to hear what that would actually amount to, power-wise.

I might be cynical, but that change would work only with the assumption that what is done on the page remains constant. What I guess would happen is that it would do 5% more useless operations. The limiting factor here is user's tolerance for bullshit, not some predefined functionality.

It depends on scale. I’m working on a site with multiple billion visits a year, so optimising a global asset will absolutely have an effect.

I get your point and I agree to some extend -- a single png doesn't remove much carbon. But it's impossible to figure out where the break even point lies. It would be irresponsible to never optimize for size or cpu usage. Where would you draw the line?

Do some napkin calculations so you get a ballpark of where the line is. That will help you discard entire categories of pointless optimizations (e.g. pictures going into a company-wide email for a 500 person company).

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