Saturday, January 28, 2012

Power consumption in Postgres 9.2

One of the issues of major concern to CPU vendors is optimising the power consumption of their devices. In a world where increasingly, computing resources are purchased in terms of fairly abstract units of work, and where, when selecting the location of a major data-centre, the local price of a kilowatt hour is likely to be weighed just as heavily as the wholesale price of bandwidth, this is quite understandable.

Globally, data centres consumed between 1.1 and 1.5 percent of electricity in 2010 (Source: Koomey). The economic and ecological importance of minimizing that number is fairly obvious.