[matthiasb]

The recommended spec is 4 cores and 6GB. Running this 24/7 for a year in US where the carbon intensity is about 400 gCO₂eq/kWh would produce about 150kg of CO2 per user per year.

I appreciate the intent of this project, but it is not a sustainable approach.

If you are taking a couple of pictures a day, you only need to run this service for a couple of minutes per day, the rest is wasted. With Google Photos, as a SaaS, users are sharing computing power and each users are emitting less CO2.

https://engineering.teads.com/sustainability/carbon-footprin...

[callmeal]

>If you are taking a couple of pictures a day, you only need to run this service for a couple of minutes per day, the rest is wasted.

You can configure your server to sleep (scheduled or use WoL), which will halve (or more) that carbon emission number.

Speaking of which, individual action will never approach the level that corporate action could. Take a look at the practice of gas flaring (2022 estimate of ~357 million tons CO2) which is about ~45kg/person on earth. Changing flaring to capture will have a bigger impact than a minisucle fraction of the population not running a server.

But profits trump everything, so I guess we're stuck shaming individuals instead.

[matthiasb]

Turning a service on/off makes a lot of sense for this kind of application.

I sincerely didn't post my comment to shame anymore.

Need for computing is growing fast and it is actually not negligible at all. See the link below, data centers emitted 300 MTCo2 in 2020, similar to the number you mentioned.

https://www.iea.org/reports/data-centres-and-data-transmissi...

[drsnow]

I don't understand how or why this defeatist, nihilistic attitude is growing in popularity. Do people just lack the self awareness to realize their inaction is tantamount to malice?

[aembleton]

If you are running the machine anyway to do other tasks like backing up and running Jellyfish then it might be worth it.

How did you get to 150kg of CO2 per user? I'm going to assume you mean each person has one instance rather than sharing an instance like a family would. So thats 375Kwh per year, which works out as drawing 42W. That seems rather high to me.

I'm hoping to try and run this on my Pi4 which idles at under 1W. You could run on a Macbook M1 which only under heavy load conumes 42W, but I doubt this is going to need consistent heavy load: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...

[bshipp]

My personal server is a 9900K with 64GB ram and normally around 35 various docker containers running on it. It's very rare to see it ever above 10% CPU utilization.

For example, I host between 5-10 minecraft servers for my kids, but they sleep while the kids aren't playing on them and only spool up when a link is requested.

A properly configured Linux box would barely need a trickle of energy when nothing is demanding its resources, so I'd guess that the estimates are likely a bit on the high side.

[matthiasb]

Yes, I assumed 1 user per server. If a family shares the server, then you can divide by the number of family members.

The link I shared has the details of the calculation. The calculation assumes 50% CPU load which is most likely too high for this use case.

[tomaskafka]

I'll put this on my Celeron fanless home NAS that's running already (and sipping well below 20 watts)

[SanderNL]

Thanks for pointing out environmental considerations. These got swept under the rug for too long.

I'm not too comfortable pointing to the cloud providers for "efficiency", but you gotta go somewhere. I get that.

Personally I'm more a fan of building more efficient software (green software?). Using 6GB @ 4 cores to handle some media is a bit much IMO..

[ALittleLight]

For perspective, this is about half the CO2 that you will exhale in a year of normal breathing. For similarly useful environmental tips, try not exercising as much - wouldn't want to increase rate of exhalation!

[matthiasb]

Where did you get the carbon you exhale? Food. If you go by that logic, you might as well stop eating.

The CO2 we exhale does not contribute to climate change because it comes from plants (and indirectly animals) that captures it back.

If you burn coal to produce electricity, it releases CO2 in the atmosphere and it will take a long time to sequester that CO2 back into fossil fuel.

[alex3305]

> I appreciate the intent of this project, but it is not a sustainable approach.

Self-hosting anything isn't sustainable. Even your modem or router isn't sustainable. But having additional backups and privacy is worth something for me. However since I'm in Europe, electricity prices here are through the roof and I try to minimize power where possible. I self host Immich on my Intel Celeron J1800 NAS that uses 19.1Wh on average. I cannot run any ML stuff that it comes with though. But for me the carbon intensity should be about 250 gCO₂eq/kWh [1]. So running my NAS produces about 42 Kg of CO₂ per year for 2 users [2]. Including 10 or so additional applications besides Immich. That sounds pretty reasonable to me.

1. https://www.eea.europa.eu/ims/greenhouse-gas-emission-intens...

2. ((0,0191 * 250 * 365,25 * 24) / 1000)

[matthiasb]

What you are saying makes sense. If you are running other valuable apps, then it isn't a waste.

I am curious though, how did you come to 1.75kg per user? I calculated 20.9kg / user / year.

250/1000/1000 kgCO₂eq/Wh x 19.1 Wh x 8760 hours in a year / 2 users = 20.9 kg / user / year

[sneak]

May this be the worst criticism levied against a project!

[oliwarner]

First, do you suppose it's running at full pelt 24/7? If suggest the specs are that high to speed to batch operations. Most of the time it'll be idling.

And second, letting Google or Apple manage this doesn't mean it doesn't use energy. They're offsetting or generating? So am I.

[matthiasb]

An idle server still consumes energy. Energy consumption increases with CPU load, RAM consumes the same regardless of the usage.

When Google manages your pictures, they don't have idle servers for each users. This is the main reason their service is more sustainable.

[detuur]

Honestly, that a simple file sync service needs that kind of specs is bewildering to me.

[Mashimo]

It's not a simple file sync service.

It has object and face detection. Metadata indexing / searching and multi user support.

[the_common_man]

What's bewildering is that you made this comment after going through the website. Did you even click the link? It's hardly a simple file sync service

[the_common_man]

These are for ec2 instances. Nowhere close to what low powered servers consime. Also, this is setup for a family.

[matthiasb]

I used an AWS instance with similar specs as reference. What kind of low power servers are you referring too?

[raincole]

You should write it as how much it adds to electricity bill, not in kg of CO2.

Kg of CO2 is a unit of fearmongering. And if you believe it's not, then the problem is why people are allowed to buy electricity so cheaply, not a photo-sync service.

By the way, a cow produces 120Kg of methane a year.

[xattt]

> By the way, a cow produces 120Kg of methane a year.

Thank goodness we're eating so many of them to help reduce their population.

/s