Energy and Performance Evaluation of Lossless File Data Compression on Server Systems

Data compression has been claimed to be an attractive solution to save energy consumption in high-end servers and data centers. However, there has not been a study to explore this. In this paper, we present a comprehensive evaluation of energy consumption for various file compression techniques implemented in software. We apply various compression tools available on Linux to a variety of data files, and we try them on server class and workstation class systems. We compare their energy and performance results against raw reads and writes. Our results reveal that software based data compression cannot be considered as a universal solution to reduce energy consumption. Various factors like the type of the data file, the compression tool being used, the read-to-write ratio of the workload, and the hardware configuration of the system impact the efficacy of this technique. In some cases, however, we found compression to save substantial energy and improve performance.