Power Saving Proxies for Web Servers

Electricity is a major cost in running a data centre, and servers are responsible for a significant percentage of the power consumption. Given the widespread use of HTTP, both as a service and a component of other services, it is worthwhile reducing the power consumption of web servers. In this paper we consider how reverse proxies, commonly used to improve the performance of web servers, might be used to improve energy efficiency. We suggest that when demand on a server is low, it may be possible to switch off servers. In their absence, an embedded system with a small energy footprint could act as a reverse proxy serving commonly-requested content. When new content is required, the reverse proxy can power on the servers to meet this new load. Our results indicate that even with a modest server, we can get a 25% power saving while maintaining acceptable performance.