Watt’s the Difference? Electron vs. Web: A Comparative Analysis of Energy and Performance in Communication Apps

This repository serves as a supplementary page for the associated paper "Watt’s the Difference? Electron vs. Web: A Comparative Analysis of Energy and Performance in Communication Apps", created to conduct the an empirical experimentation as apart of Green Lab(X_418158) class 2023/2024 semester project at VU(Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam).

This research aims to thoroughly analyze apps like Skype, Discord, and Slack that use Electron technology, comparing them to their web-based versions. The goal is to measure how much energy and computing resources they consume, focusing on performance. By doing this, we want to give regular users and companies solid information to make environmentally friendly software decisions.

Accordingly, This repository is devided into three main parts:

• The Browse experiment (Browser folder)
• The Electron experiment (Electron folder)
• The Utility which is used by both section of the experiment (Utility folder).

Prerequisite

1. Make sure you have Python in your system if not download it here

2. Install all the python library required to run the system

(The libraries were listed inside app folder in requirements.txt)

pip install -r requirements.txt

Information in ACTION!

You can also find more information about this experiment in action from this clip here or if you want to only see how the script work you can jump to here

⚠️ The coordinates which are used by pyautogui provided in this repo only work on a particular machine if you want to run the script on your machine please change the coordinations to match your machine

Browser

Folder structure

• Browser
  • Discord
    • discordCamera.csv
    • discordScreenSharing.csv
    • discordStartMeeting.csv
  • Skype
    • skypeScreenSharing.csv
    • skypeStartMeeting.csv
  • Slack
    • slackScreenSharing.csv
    • slackStartMeeting.csv
  • measurement.sh
  • script.py

Electron

Folder structure

• Electron
  • Discord
    • discordCamera.csv
    • discordScreenSharing.csv
    • discordStartMeeting.csv
  • Skype
    • skypeScreenSharing.csv
    • skypeStartMeeting.csv
  • Slack
    • slackScreenSharing.csv
    • slackStartMeeting.csv
  • measurement.sh
  • script.py

Utility

Folder structure

• Utility
  • VirtualCamera.py
  • VirtualMicrophone.py
  • iterations.csv
  • media
    • audio.mp3
  • mouseCoordinates.py

Data-Analysis

The "green-analysis" directory consists of a R project for data-analysis of experiment data.

Folder structure

• preprocessing This directory consists of R files to clean the raw data, and use it for data analysis. Note: The data folder is not upploaded on GitHub, so data-preprocessing can't be run without it. The raw data is in data-analysis/data.csv file. The clean data after preprocessing is stored in ``data-analysis/clean-data.csv`
  • data-preprocessing.R
  • outliers-detection.R
  • outliers-removal.R
• data-analysis data-analysis folder consists of r files for performing data-analysis methods on data, and the resulting data files.
  • Whitney.R
  • data.csv
  • runs_avg.R
  • analysis.R
  • transformation.R
  • avg-config-data.csv
  • delta-whitney-test.R
  • transformed-data.csv
  • clean-data.csv
  • normality.R
  • variables.R
  • correction.R
  • p-values-duration.csv
  • visualization.R
  • p-values-mode.csv
• graphs Folder containing all graphs and plots images
• renv This directory is for R virtual environment.