Pirate Bay’s power footprint is equivalent to vacuum cleaner

Since moving to the cloud last week and ditching its servers altogether, The Pirate Bay has reduced its power requirements to that of the average vacuum cleaner, according to the sites current unnamed staff – who presumably aren't the founders, who've been tangling with the Swedish court system for the past few years.

According to the conversation TPB staff had with Torrentfreak, the current site uses around 500GB of storage to maintain its millions of torrents, including a 6 months database backup, and despite serving millions of people a day, is only consuming around 2.5 kilowatts.

Describing some of the optimisations the site had made, staff said: “low power consumption, low ram usage, low storage requirements. This is also good when it comes to hiding backups around the net, as there’s no need for a big pipe or disk to keep a daily copy.”

The power usage is only an estimation, but if true, the figures place The Pirate Bay as one of the greenest high profile websites in existence. In comparison, when running 16 dedicated servers and three switches, the site consumed more than double what it does now – closer to 6,000 watts.

“We now use the equivalent of a large vacuum cleaner, which means we are probably the greenest Alexa top 100 site,” TPB concluded.

One of the more interesting figures to come out of this announcement however is that we now know there are 17 virtual “cloud” servers being used by The Pirate Bay. In the previous announcement of its transition to the ethereal realm, we were simply told “many” were in operation.

KitGuru Says: The cloud has been shown to be a very efficient platform for reducing energy expenditure. It will be interesting to see if other sites follow the example of TPB and help cut back on their green footprint.

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