Response Times and Number of Requests
As we approach the Fall semester, traffic is starting to ramp up.
With the greater amount of data we can more confidently draw some conclusions. While the addition of CPUs to the application servers had a definite, measurable positive effect on system load, this did not translate into much, if any, of an impact on request response times, which are still creeping up.
A reminder: we had several site launches around that response time spike which resulted in a rather odd distribution of items in our memcached layer. It’s possible the additional CPU did have an effect on response time, but it is not apparent because it is merely mitigating the degradation caused by the uneven cache distribution.