Investigating the Impact of Software Design Patterns on Energy Consumption

GoF’s design patterns are popular structures designed for flexible and reusable object-oriented software. However, their energy impact is not well understood, with contradictory existing results. In this paper, we aim to answer the relation between design patterns and energy consumption through a multi-platform and multi-software stack empirical study, covering all design patterns, and multiple hardware, OS, languages and compilers. We found, with a high confidence level, that none of the GoF’s design patterns has a significant impact on energy consumption. Therefore, they can be considered energy-neutral, allowing eco-friendly developers to continue using them. We argue that software energy efficiency should rather be considered within the business logic embedded by a design pattern, and ultimately raised to a higher perspective of software development.