This is FASCINATING. Researchers were able to pin down the cause of measurable global 60 second power spikes to software that does regular checks on the minute mark. They found large scale battery installations as one major cause, but obviously this is true for any other computerized system that does cron jobs and has a synchronized clock. As weird as it sounds, adding random 0-59.999s delays to cron jobs in Linux distributions and other software would actually help the power grid.
Post by Violet
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Hanno Zulla
@hzulla@infosec.exchange
Mystery of 60-Second Fluctuations in Power Grids Solved
Why do our grids show a brief spike in electricity demand every minute? A team led by Dirk Witthaut from Forschungszentrum Jülich has now demonstrated that this is due to regular power checks carried out by large-scale battery storage systems. These findings could help to make our electricity supply more robust, as the team reports in an article published in Nature Energy.
Veronica Olsen 🍂
@veronica@mastodon.online
@hzulla Similar problem for servers and clusters with on the hour spikes in compute. It was a big issue in my previous job. Especially around 14:00 when most data sources we used had been updated.
Violet
@amethyst@hachyderm.io
Yeah, I know at my last place we had to add deliberate a deliberate couple minutes of jitter to user-scheduled jobs because clients would all choose the same time!
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Veronica Olsen 🍂
@veronica@mastodon.online
@amethyst We had the additional fun result that since our VMs ground to a halt at 14:00, people moved to scheduled CI jobs instead, so then between 14 and 16 each day, no one could get a PR through because all the runners were queued up for the next 2h. 😅