Toward Greener Background Processes -- Measuring Energy Cost of Autosave Feature

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Küüsvek, Maria, Anwar, Hina
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Küüsvek, Maria
Anwar, Hina
author_facet Küüsvek, Maria
Anwar, Hina
contents Background processes in desktop applications are often overlooked in energy consumption studies, yet they represent continuous, automated workloads with significant cumulative impact. This paper introduces a reusable process for evaluating the energy behavior of such features at the level of operational design. The process works in three phases: 1) decomposing background functionality into core operations, 2) operational isolation, and 3) controlled measurements enabling comparative profiling. We instantiate the process in a case study of autosave implementations across three open-source Python-based text editors. Using 900 empirical software-based energy measurements, we identify key design factors affecting energy use, including save frequency, buffering strategy, and auxiliary logic such as change detection. We give four actionable recommendations for greener implementations of autosave features in Python to support sustainable software practices.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_11738
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Toward Greener Background Processes -- Measuring Energy Cost of Autosave Feature
Küüsvek, Maria
Anwar, Hina
Software Engineering
Background processes in desktop applications are often overlooked in energy consumption studies, yet they represent continuous, automated workloads with significant cumulative impact. This paper introduces a reusable process for evaluating the energy behavior of such features at the level of operational design. The process works in three phases: 1) decomposing background functionality into core operations, 2) operational isolation, and 3) controlled measurements enabling comparative profiling. We instantiate the process in a case study of autosave implementations across three open-source Python-based text editors. Using 900 empirical software-based energy measurements, we identify key design factors affecting energy use, including save frequency, buffering strategy, and auxiliary logic such as change detection. We give four actionable recommendations for greener implementations of autosave features in Python to support sustainable software practices.
title Toward Greener Background Processes -- Measuring Energy Cost of Autosave Feature
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11738