Abstract
Power consumption has become one major challenge in designing highperformance servers. Recently, some researchers postulate that better energy e±ciency can be achieved by using low power devices originally designed for mobile embedded systems. In this report, we validate this hypothesis by measuring the power and the performance of web servers on system level. We consider the power and the energy consumption of processors, memory, and hard disk drives. Our data indicate that, compared with a Pentium4-based web server, a XScale-based computer can achieve more than 1.7 times higher energy e±ciency (web pages per Joule) while its throughput (web pages per second) is less than 20%. Our comparison includes both static and dynamic web pages with di®erent sizes. We also indicate some challenges to design an energy-e±cient high-performance web server by using this approach.
Date of this Version
December 2003