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I really wonder if total cost of ownership/energy required to run a cluster of old android phones would actually be lower than one or two servers.

The phones are ARM, will have battery issues (esp if they run 24/7) so you need to provision for safety, can only be connected over wifi, have thermal issues (they are meant for burst, not sustained load), have non-homogeneous bootloaders/bugs and so on

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Yeah these are all very valid issues! I imagine it would depend on the specific use case and how much computing power you need. Also the energy going into the production of the phone should be considered as well.

Being able to remove the battery and run from AC would be very helpful I think. Phones used to be able to do this but a lot of modern ones don't have removable batteries which is a problem of it's own.

My VPS use is actually fairly bursty though. It spends 99% of the time asleep since I don't do much with it. Even a small website/webserver or hosting cgit and git over ssh would be very light and almost entirely burst loads for me!

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