Right, I agree that scaling out is great. However, bursting is also a great feature; most loads are bursty (you're caching data and have a cache miss or timeou

Right, I agree that scaling out is great. However, bursting is also a great feature; most loads are bursty (you're caching data and have a cache miss or timeout, you request an admin page which does a lot of computation.) All time-sharing involves statistical reasoning, even within your own application: all requests might be served from cache, or ten people might issue different cache-miss requests near-simultaneously. You just reason that under normal circumstances e.g. 80% of your requests will be served from cache, and that determines your typical load. Short-term bursting means that maybe you can size your machine closer to the mean load, rather than the 2 or 3 sigma load. So, I want _both_ bursting and scale-out :-) The benchmark is fair for measuring CPU bursting performance, but we do need a more comprehensive benchmark suite.