GreenBundle: An Empirical Study on the Energy Impact of Bundled Processing

Abstract

Energy consumption is a concern in the data-center and at the edge, on mobile devices such as smartphones. Software that consumes too much energy threatens the utility of the end-user's mobile device. Energy consumption is fundamentally a systemic kind of performance and hence it should be addressed at design time via a software architecture that supports it, rather than after release, via some form of refactoring. Unfortunately developers often lack knowledge of what kinds of designs and architectures can help address software energy consumption. In this paper we show that some simple design choices can have significant effects on energy consumption. In particular we examine the Model-View-Controller architectural pattern and demonstrate how converting to Model-View-Presenter with bundling can improve the energy performance of both benchmark systems and real world applications. We show the relationship between energy consumption and bundled and delayed view updates: bundling events in the presenter can often reduce energy consumption by 30%.