Investigating the effect of design patterns on energy consumption

Abstract

Gang of Four (GoF) patterns are well‐known best practices for the design of object‐oriented systems. In this paper, we aim at empirically assessing their relationship to energy consumption, ie, a performance indicator that has recently attracted the attention of both researchers and practitioners. To achieve this goal, we investigate pattern‐participating methods (ie, those that play a role within the pattern) and compare their energy consumption to the consumption of functionally equivalent alternative (nonpattern) solutions. We obtained the alternative solution by refactoring the pattern instances using well‐known transformations (eg, replace polymorphism with conditional statements). The comparison is performed on 169 methods of 2 GoF patterns (namely, State/Strategy and Template Method), retrieved from 2 well‐known open source projects. The results suggest that for the majority of cases the alternative design excels in terms of energy consumption. However, in some cases (eg, when the method is large in size or invokes many methods) the pattern solution presents similar or lower energy consumption. The outcome of our study can be useful to both researchers and practitioners, because we: (1) provide evidence on a possible negative effect of GoF patterns, and (2) can provide guidance on which cases the use of the pattern is not hurting energy consumption.

A Case Study on Design Patterns and Software Defects in Open Source Software

“…They also concluded that neither prior exposure to design patterns nor prior exposure to the programming language was a significant factor. Feitosa et al [34] investigate the energy consumption on State/Strategy and Template Method on two open source software projects and compared their results to alternative solutions. Their results showed that alternative solutions use less energy in many cases.…”

Data-Centric Green AI An Exploratory Empirical Study

“…Regarding energy consumption, we do not deem that adopting only energy consumption as dependent variable constitutes per se a prominent threat in our experiment. In addition, utilizing exclusively energy consumption measurements is a common practice in the field of software energy efficiency [15], [39]- [41]. However, relying on a specific tool to estimate the energy consumption (namely CodeCarbon), could have influenced the construct validity of our experiment.…”

Software Design of Energy-Aware Peripheral Control for Sustainable Internet-of-Things Devices

“…The authors in [16] analyzed the effect of different well-known design patterns (e.g., Template Method, State, and Strategy) described in [17] on energy consumption and implemented alternative nonpattern solutions for comparison. Other approaches analyzed the impact of object-oriented programming features (e.g., polymorphism, inheritance, and operator overloading) and design patterns that use the features on energy efficiency while focusing on server systems [18] and embedded systems [19].…”