Impact of programming environments and practices on energy consumption

Energy consumption and sustainability are of increasing importance in our current society. In the early 2000s, predictions on the growth of energy consumption of ICT were worrying. Due to improvements made in hardware development to reduce idle consumption, the reduction of overhead costs in data centres and the use of more efficient devices, the predicted growth was not reached. Since the use of ICT and the amount of data being transferred continues to increase, it is important to look at other possibilities for reducing energy consumption. We looked at the energy consumption of Object-Oriented software, specifically focusing on C#. By performing empirical experiments, we developed a methodology for performing energy consumption measurements and we analysed the impact of compiler settings on the energy consumption of software. We found that the compiler settings can have a different impact based on the software being run, but there was one setting that performed the worst for both energy consumption and execution time. This setting should be avoided, while further analysis is necessary to discover if the differing impact can be linked to programming structures. We also propose experiments for analysing the energy consumption of programming structures which could lead to guidelines for programmers.