But back to chips and heat generation. Has anyone instrumented some of these servers (and their software) to figure out how much heat various functions generate?
It seems that someone has done just that. A list member sent me a private reply pointing me to http://www.linuxpowertop.org/ I still think that special hardware that can work with profiling data to target specific blocks of code inside the process would also be useful to identify best programming practices. However, many programmers debug their code quite effectively without profilers by means of print statements, and this powertop tool can be leveraged by a programmer with source code available. If nothing else, code two variations of a program and compare powertop results. --Michael Dillon