On the Energy Cost of Static Analysis Precision

Abstract

Static analysis tools are commonly used in continuous integration (CI) pipelines to detect potential defects without executing the program. Such tools offer configuration options that control how thoroughly the code is analyzed. In SpotBugs, this is done through an effort level setting (Min, Less, More, Max), where higher levels enable deeper and more computationally intensive analysis. In this paper, we study how these effort levels affect energy consumption and analysis results. Our results show that higher effort levels generally consume more energy, which fits our intuition. However, the increase is not uniform: deeper static analysis comes with additional energy cost, but the marginal benefit of higher effort levels may be limited in some cases. This suggests that static analysis tool designers could make energy consumption more transparent and provide configuration options that explicitly expose trade-offs between analysis depth and energy cost.