What would be much more interesting than "peak responses per second," which is a weird metric to begin with, is the actual histogram of sampled throughputs. Or

What would be much more interesting than "peak responses per second," which is a weird metric to begin with, is the actual histogram of sampled throughputs. Or at the very least a box-and-whisker plot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_plot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_plot). Most folks who have run Rails at scale, for example, find that the untuned garbage collector in MRI (Ruby's default interpreter) introduces a large amount of variance, for example.