Towards Greener Software: Measuring Performance and Energy Efficiency of Enterprise Applications

Performance is an important aspect of software quality in most software applications. In recent years, the topic of energy efficiency has become increasingly important. Enterprise applications running in the cloud receive particular attention. Poor performance and low energy efficiency lead to high operating costs and a negative impact on the environment. Recognizing the significance of performance and energy efficiency as software quality attributes and how to measure them is crucial. This research project aims to investigate how two types of software quality attributes, performance and resource and energy efficiency, are measured according to the state of the art and the practice today; differences are identified and analysed. Following an empirical approach, an existing application test setup and its measurement results (publicly available in the “Growing Green Software” blog) are first reproduced and then compared with the behaviour of a second sample application. The two respective sample applications are open source-projects leveraging Java and Spring Boot; one of them comes as a set of microservices. Tools such as JMeter and JoularJX, configurations, and metrics across different test environments and enterprise applications were experimented with. Contemporary software engineering practices such as Domain-Driven Design and UML were used to analyse and document the software architectures of the selected applications. The measurements confirmed that the performance and energy consumption of the application are significantly influenced by external factors such as hardware, operating system, and implementation details. They show that the relative distribution of energy consumption is comparable across different test environments and enterprise applications. Furthermore, the results suggest an inverse correlation between performance and energy efficiency when different hardware is compared. They also indicate a strong correlation when the same hardware is used but implementation details vary. Future research could explore the energy efficiency of cloud-native applications and cloud infrastructure.