Measure energy consumption of software

You can't improve what you don't measure!

Measuring of the actual energy consumption with real data from a power monitoring source is not always possible and in fact quite complex. For instance, if your software runs in the cloud, you don't have access to real time energy consumption data. However, it is possible to estimate the energy consumption by using a model.

This note gives an overview about all techniques I'm aware of on how to retrieve the energy consumption of software. Different software environment impact models are discussed in the following note: Estimate energy consumption of web and cloud-based software with models

If you just want to improve the energy efficiency of your software but don't want to or are not able to gather data about energy consumption, the usage of proxy metrics may be sufficient and is a lot easier to retrieve: Using proxy metrics for improving energy efficiency of software

Recommendations for performing energy measurements

@Guldner.etal.2024.DevelopmentEvaluationReference