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

Posted by timothy on from the 10-percent-at-web-scale dept.

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.

2 of 54 comments (clear)

  1. Should we care? by penguinoid · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Is this a case of "Facebook was being obliviously wasteful" or a case of "Facebook discovers way to increase efficiency"? I'm guessing it's the former.

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    1. Re:Should we care? by penguinoid · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The first is like increasing fuel economy by designing a better engine, the second is like increasing your own fuel economy by patching that leaky fuel tank. Even I know how to turn off or put my computer into sleep mode to save energy -- will anyone but Facebook gain anything from this?

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      Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways