3 ms·
How meaningful is “per day” as a performance metric?
by andrewstuart 1y ago
How meaningful is “per day” as a performance metric?
- diath 1y agoNot at all, it may be a useful marketing metric, but not a performance one. The average load does not matter when your backend can't handle the peaks.
- xnx 1y agoTrue, though a lot higher spec'ed systems couldn't handle the minimum 5000 requests/second this implies.
- dspillett 1y agoAs a comparison between implementations it can be useful. It is more than a big enough number that, if the test was actually done over a day, temporary oddities are dwarfed. If the test was done over an hour and multiplied then it is meaningless: just quote the per hour figure. Same, but more so, if the tests were much shorter than an hour.
- hu3 1y agoI work on a system for a client that averages 50 requests per second but handles 6k req/s during peaks and we have SLA of P99% <= 50ms. So I'd say per day is not very meaningful.
- kragen 1y agoIt was traditional 30 years ago to describe web site traffic levels in terms of hits per day, perhaps because "two hundred thousand hits per day" sounds more impressive than "2.3 hits per second". Consequently a lot of us have some kind of intuition for what kind of service might need to handle a thousand hits per day, a million hits per day, or a billion hits per day. As other commenters have pointed out, peak traffic is actually more important.