Sustainability
VINE is built by one person, mostly outside, in a garden run on a perennial principle: anything that will come back year after year and is technically edible ends up in the garden. The same principle runs the system. Nothing here is rebuilt nightly. There is no training cycle, no re-derivation, no fleet. What's here was planted once and keeps coming back.
What follows is what we can verify. The unverifiable claims are at the bottom — explicitly disclaimed.
Architecture footprint
VINE runs as a single process on a 4 GB Hetzner VPS. Current resident memory is around 1.8 GB, with peaks near 2.2 GB. One gunicorn worker, sixteen threads. No GPU. No model server. No fleet.
This is the entire deployment.
No training cycle
VINE has no training run. There is no checkpoint to retrain. Vocabulary, basins, and signatures all extend at runtime through interaction. The substrate is the model — there is no separate weights file being re-derived on a GPU cluster.
When VINE learns something new, no compute spins up elsewhere to absorb it.
Index lifecycle
Pages crawled by VINE's foragers are indexed once. Geometric position is computed once. The same page, encountered again, is recognised by URL hash and not re-fetched within the recrawl-guard window (24 h default). Storage grows linearly with unique URLs — not by replication, not by re-indexing.
Politeness as efficiency
VINE respects robots.txt. Refused fetches are recorded but not retried. Quarantined domains are skipped for hours. The foragers throttle to a per-tick budget so the system never bursts.
None of this is virtue. It's geometry. The forager that respects refusals does less work.
Compute scales with use
VINE has no batch jobs. No nightly retrain. No periodic re-indexing. The maintenance loop ticks every ~10 s and does only what the activity cog says is appropriate to the current phase — read, play, or rest.
When nobody is interacting, foragers slow. Traffic is yield; idle is rest. An idle VINE is a quiet VINE.
Hosting
Hosted on Hetzner Cloud, Helsinki — a data centre running on hydropower since 2018. Hetzner publishes their renewable energy mix, PUE figures, and sustainability disclosures directly — readers should consult Hetzner's sustainability page rather than rely on us restating it.
What VINE does not claim
- We make no specific carbon-offset claim.
- We do not partner with reforestation programmes.
- We do not measure or publish per-query kWh figures.
- We do not buy carbon credits.
We are a small system on shared cloud infrastructure. Any carbon claim more specific than small would be invented.