A Curated List of Open-source Software-only Energy Efficiency Measurement Tools: A GitHub Mining Study

2026-03-23

AI Summary

This study addresses the lack of a systematic overview of open-source software energy measurement tools, which hinders energy-aware software design and tool selection. From a mining software repositories (MSR) perspective, the authors employ qualitative content analysis to screen and categorize 585 GitHub projects, identifying 24 high-quality open-source energy measurement tools. The work systematically characterizes these tools in terms of architectural design, measurement granularity—spanning from CPU-level to process, container, and AI workload levels—and their capabilities for carbon emission estimation. By elucidating evolutionary trends in tool development, this research provides software architects with a structured foundation and practical guidance for informed tool selection in energy-efficient software engineering.

Technology Category

• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Solvers and Tools
• Application Domains: Software Engineering
• Machine Learning: Hardware-aware ML

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web measurements
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements

Abstract

Energy efficiency has become a growing concern in software development, leading to the need for tools designed to measure energy consumption. While several energy measurement tools are available as open-source projects, their characteristics and adoption remain underexplored. This work presents an empirical study based on a Mining Software Repositories (MSR) approach to identify, classify, and analyze software energy monitoring tools publicly available on GitHub. We qualitatively analyzed an initial dataset of 585 repositories to identify key design aspects, including measurement granularity and underlying design principles. After this analysis, we retained 24 repositories as relevant energy measuring software tools. The qualitative analysis we conduct reveals a clear evolution from early CPU-centric and machine-level monitoring utilities toward more diverse tools that support multi-level granularity (process, container, and AI workload levels) and integrate emission estimation capabilities. This study provides the first structured overview of open-source energy and emission measurement tools from an MSR perspective, which may be beneficial for software architects when designing energy-aware software.

Problem

• energy efficiency
• open-source software
• energy measurement tools
• GitHub mining
• software repositories

Innovation

• Mining Software Repositories
• energy efficiency
• open-source tools
• emission estimation
• multi-level granularity