On the Energy Consumption of CPython

Interpreted programming languages, like Python, are
amongst the most popular programming languages. This, combined with
high developer efficiency leads to many web-application backends and
web-services that are written in Python. While it is known that that
interpreted languages like Python are way less energy efficient compared
to compiled languages like C++, Rust, etc., little is known about the energy
efficiency of various versions of Python interpreters. In this paper, we
study via a controlled lab experiment the energy consumption of various
versions of the Python interpreter CPython when running a server-side
rendered web-application. Our results indicate that currently the most
energy efficient version is CPython 3.12. Energy consumption of CPython
3.12 can drop by more than 8% compared to previous versions.