In reference to (per duration) values "requests per second" is ambiguous, what is a request? Instructions per seconds exists but is only useful for comparing t

In reference to (per duration) values "requests per second" is ambiguous, what is a request? Instructions per seconds exists but is only useful for comparing tasks on the same hardware and architecture. We saw the abuse of MIPS for comparing machines in the past just as we see it with FLOPS in GPUs today. MIPS benchmarks like whetstone differ even on the same CPU depend on the language used, compiler used, and the options at compile time. TPC, SPEC and other synthetic benchmarks just succumbed to game theory and usually don't apply to real world loads. The field you want to look into is "Queuing Theory" If you are lucky enough that you can assume your system is Markovian you get simple formula like: mean service time == 1/(mean service rate) To show just how old it is here is a good paper about M/M/1 queues from 1958 that is still useful today. https://msp.org/pjm/1958/8-1/pjm-v8-n1-p08-s.pdf https://msp.org/pjm/1958/8-1/pjm-v8-n1-p08-s.pdf