Eco-design of G4IT

Context

G4IT is an open source tool developed by Sopra Steria to measure the environmental footprint of information systems. Ironically, the application itself carried technical debt that weighed on its own efficiency: EcoIndex scores in grades C and D, no compression, no caching policy and too many HTTP requests per page.

As part of an industry project at ESIR, our team was asked to audit the application and implement measurable optimizations.

Approach

• Training in software eco-design (Inria MOOC on the environmental impact of digital technology)
• Initial audit with GreenIT-Analysis to identify and prioritize critical issues
• HTTP caching policy covering 100% of static resources
• Gzip compression built into the production pipeline
• Redesign of the Angular style architecture to reduce inline styles and improve caching
• Contributions submitted and approved through pull requests on the official G4IT repository

Technical decisions

The most structural lever was switching from ViewEncapsulation.Emulated to ViewEncapsulation.None on structural components. This change required a deep restructuring of the SCSS: local styles were consolidated into prefixed global classes, and ::ng-deep selectors were removed to avoid inheritance conflicts.

Beforehand, setting up the local environment (Angular, Spring Boot, PostgreSQL) took several sessions with Sopra Steria’s technical experts to resolve version conflicts and TypeScript compilation errors.

Results

• Transfer size divided by more than 13: from 7,876 KB to 582 KB
• HTTP requests divided by 3: from more than 100 to under 33 per page
• Gzip compression on 100% of static resources, up from 0%
• EcoIndex raised from grade C/D to A/B across all modules
• Contributions merged into the official G4IT repository