Excessively Adequate

One Million Hits Per Month

…is surprisingly (to me, anyway) relatively few – about one per 2.5 seconds. Something1 to keep in mind when speccing out systems.

Relatedly: There’s a lot of hours in a year, especially for systems running 24/7. A cloud server2 that costs $0.12/hour seems pretty inexpensive, yet it’ll rack up a $1000 bill at the end of each year.

Doing the math isn’t hard, of course, but your3 brain might not always do it if left unprompted.

  1. Of course, access patterns won’t ever be distributed uniformly and different workloads are spikey to varying degrees. ↩

  2. An example from the AWS universe: m4.large with 200 GB of EBS storage. (Disregarding savings plans or other cost-cutting measures for always-on instances.) ↩

  3. Again, maybe I’m wired weird and you’re able to translate from “xx per second” to “yy per hour” to “zz per year” easily. But, unless you need to do that a lot, I’d guess it’s not instinctive. ↩