HN Explorer

Ask HN: How expensive is pushing to GitHub?

3 points by BMSR ↗ HN
Anybody knows how heavy doing the average code commit push to a GitHub repo is? I guess in terms of hardware usage, or if you can translate that to environmental impact that's ok too. How much is triggered by updating the text files?

3 comments

[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 14.9 ms ] thread
gregjor
Define "average code commit." If you knew the average commit size you could probably come up with some ballpark number of electrons consumed and CO2 released. Now I have one more thing to cause anxiety and lose sleep over, as if plastic straws weren't bad enough.

Once we have solar everywhere (thanks Elon!), nuclear fusion, and can harness entire stars to power blockchains and LLMs we won't care about this. It's not far off now.

BMSR
Well in order to really know, we'd need to know exactly what processes get triggered at GitHub after a commit. Maybe it has certain triggers like update databases, re-calculate information, etc. So I'm asking if someone who knows about the insides of GitHub could simply answer if it's "cheap and efficient enough" or "every commit is kinda expensive".