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murkttoday at 7:11 AM4 repliesview on HN

> writing “90 kBq” is a lot more convenient than “ninety thousand requests per second” and “90,000 requests/s”

I once made a joke during the talk that MongoDB is better than Postgres in two ways, and one of those ways is that it’s faster to say “Mongo” than “Post-gres-Qu-eL”.

Same vibe here. 90krps is not that longer than 90kBq.

With requests per minute, rpm: engine in my car revs up to 9000 requests per minute!

It’s sometimes funny to see some marketing posts like “we built our infrastructure to handle UNREAL load during the event, 100 million of requests during the day.” Which is just a bit more than 1100 rps.


Replies

Sesse__today at 8:45 AM

Mostly, people who do “requests per day” have a lot lower load than 1100 requests/sec, too… it's a typical red flag for having a team that know a lot less about performance than they think.

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atoavtoday at 8:51 AM

I like using units that are already used to describe what is meant, e.g. if you have a periodic frequency Hz is totally fine and easy to math with. Now I wasn't aware of Bq, but it makes sense to have a separate unit for the stochastic equivalent.

The only problem with that unit is that it may require explaination. Hertz is a little bit more commonly understood, while someone seeing 2.5 Bq will very likely wonder what that means.

In the end both Hz and Bq resolve to s⁻¹ or 1/s So maybe request/s is just okay as a unit? In the end it depends also on the surrounding UI.

childintimetoday at 7:51 AM

xps or x/s would be the better unit, no?

Reads like transactions per second. Or as times per second. Or as just anything per second ;)

1100x/s. 1100xps.

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vascotoday at 8:41 AM

I really had a hard time figuring out if the post is satire.

Mackerels per second would be funnier though, if were making shit up.