Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
energy consumption
build automation
CI pipelines
energy profiling
phase-level decomposition
Joule-Profiler: Profiling the Energy Consumption of Build Automation Tools Made Easy
🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the invisibility of energy consumption in software build pipelines and the limitations of existing estimation-based tools that cannot decompose energy usage across individual build phases. To overcome these challenges, this work proposes an open-source command-line tool enabling hardware-level energy measurement with user-defined phase attribution. By monitoring standard output for fine-grained phase-level energy analysis, the approach transcends measurement constraints inherent to cloud environments. Technically, it integrates Intel RAPL, NVML, and Maven plugins with pattern matching to achieve precise energy tracking. Validation on the Gson project successfully generated comprehensive phase-resolved energy profiles for both cold and warm builds. Ultimately, this research provides a reproducible, fine-grained energy efficiency assessment framework to advance green software engineering practices.
📝 Abstract
Build pipelines are integral to modern software development, yet their energy footprint remains largely invisible to practitioners. Existing CI energy tools either rely on model-based estimation (due to hardware access restrictions in cloud runners) or report only total pipeline energy without decomposing it into meaningful phases. Joule-Profiler is an open-source command-line tool for Linux that measures hardware energy consumption via Intel RAPL (CPU), NVML (NVIDIA GPU), and attributes it to user-defined program phases by monitoring standard output. In this tool paper, we demonstrate Joule-Profiler in the context of Maven build pipelines using Google Gson as a case study. By applying a token pattern-matching Maven plugin invocations, we analyze builds across the 5 most recent Gson releases into per-phase energy profiles, comparing cold builds (empty local repository) and warm builds (cached dependencies).
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Energy Profiling
Build Automation
Hardware Measurement
Phase Attribution
CI/CD Pipelines
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