What's the “average” requests per second for a production web application?

Question

I have no frame of reference in terms of what\'s considered \"fast\"; I\'d always wondered this but have never found a straight answer...

Answer 1

Note that hit-rate graphs will be sinusoidal patterns with 'peak hours' maybe 2x or 3x the rate that you get while users are sleeping. (Can be useful when you're scheduling the daily batch-processing stuff to happen on servers)

You can see the effect even on 'international' (multilingual, localised) sites like wikipedia

Answer 2

That is a very open apples-to-oranges type of question.

You are asking 1. the average request load for a production application 2. what is considered fast

These don't neccessarily relate.

Your average # of requests per second is determined by

a. the number of simultaneous users

b. the average number of page requests they make per second

c. the number of additional requests (i.e. ajax calls, etc)

As to what is considered fast.. do you mean how few requests a site can take? Or if a piece of hardware is considered fast if it can process xyz # of requests per second?