How Facebook Is Saving Power By 10-15% Through Better Load Balancing

An anonymous reader writes Facebook today revealed details about Autoscale, a system for power-efficient load balancing that has been rolled out to production clusters in its data centers. The company says it has "demonstrated significant energy savings." For those who don't know, load balancing refers to distributing workloads across multiple computing resources, in this case servers. The goal is to optimize resource use, which can mean different things depending on the task at hand.

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to sum it up

[roman_mir]

to sum it up, if a FB server is idle it consumes 60 watts, if CPU is minimally utilised it consumes 130 watts and if it's utilised more it consumes 150 watts.

Instead of round robin use an algorithm that pushes requests to the servers that are already processing other requests, thus allowing many CPUs to remain at 60 watts, while some CPUs to hit 150 watts of power consumption and so instead of doubling or almost trippling power consumption of all servers due to round robin distribution of requests, tripple power consumption of fewer CPUs and let many CPUs to stay at 60 watts.

Sure, it's an interesting thing to optimise, but unless you are running dozens or maybe hundreds and even thousands of servers in a data centre you won't care about this much at all.