It can, in my experience, be very useful to introduce a unit for ‘requests’, as well as one for ‘CPUs’.

It lets us produce dimensionally valid formulae for relating request rates (in requests per second) to compute requirements (in CPU seconds per request), data transfer (in bytes per request), and bandwidth (in bytes per second).

I kind of wish software engineering’s computer science underpinnings offered a few more of the kind of notational underpinnings that physics offers mechanical or electronic engineers.

Why don’t we have a standard set of letters for representing data sizes, requests, compute units, etc; and a set of widely known formulae as familiar to every programmer as V=IR is to an electrical engineer?

The only standard symbol computer science has given us (or maybe more accurately that we have taken up) is n, as in O(n), for collection sizes.

I wonder if we can do better?