Head to head comparison against a control test system

[woodcoder]

As with any project aiming to optimise anything, it would be great to sanity check that this project actually helps save carbon.

One possible way to check this might be to setup two small servers and run a head to head test - one using ca and cron and one just using cron.

I don't quite know how you'd instrument or measure this but it would need to do something like:

1. measure the amount and timestamp of energy used on both servers
2. cross-check the historic actual carbon intensity data from the carbon aware SDK

I guess (1) could be done with a simple 'how long did the job take' metric - but this might not be very accurate.

Maybe using a tool like Scaphandre might work?

The goal is to show that the, hopefully small, overhead added by ca is actually helping the overall goal of reducing emissions on a day by day basis!