Intentionally Slow

One of the best things to happen after the release of the Raspberry Pi was the explosion of low resource applications and services. It truly was a boon for people who not only wanted to run something on the under-powered RPI, but also on older hardware they already had.

I am still one of those people. Currently sitting on my desk is an Acer Aspire EasyStore H340 that has an OG Atom processor and 2GB of DDR2 RAM. It is still capable of being a decent file server 15 years after its original release.

I know in the self-hosting and homelabbing communities, there is a fixation on hardware. The faster the better. But, this comes as a double impact on the environment.

One, as hardware requirements go up for programs, so does the energy cost. I am on a very strict budget and I monitor my energy usage closely, especially in my homelab where things can get out of control. Low resource programs and applications are vital for keeping energy usage low. This means instead of running a dual Xeon behemoth, I can self-host to my hearts content on low powered devices like the iKoolCore R1 that idles at 5 watts. Running Hugo and FreshRSS are barely noticeable on the machine.

Two is keeping old hardware useful. Now, I know that old hardware isn’t as power efficient as new and there is a trade-off of compute per watt. Yet, our goal should always be to reduce e-waste. A way to reduce waste is to always have our programs, software, and applications using a little resources as possible.

There are many doing a good work in this realm. I just get nervous seeing the hardware specs jump on mini or micro computers to satisfy the group that is always asking for more. I think hardware cycles should be intentionally slower to encourage devs to find solutions rather than banking on everyone’s compute power always going up.