Once you have gathered historical data on capacity, you can begin analyzing it with an eye toward recognizing any trends and recurring patterns.įor example, in the last chapter I recounted how at Flickr, we discovered Sunday has been historically the highest photo upload day of the week. Conversely, the company financial officers will not hold you in high regard either when you’ve purchased a lot of equipment that lay idle, only to see its price drop a few months later.Ī good capacity plan depends on knowing your needs for your most important resources, and how those needs change over time. If you can wait six months before buying a piece of equipment, you will likely end up with faster and less expensive equipment at that time.Ĭertainly, you don’t want to be caught unprepared when growth takes place-this book is all about saving you from that career-threatening situation. Moore’s now-famous axiom in 1965 that postulates the number of transistors on an integrated circuit approximately doubles every eighteen months) holds true forever, we can predict that manufacturers will continue to lower costs over time. This rule is derived directly from the obvious trend in computing costs: all forms of hardware are becoming cheaper, even as they become faster and more reliable. As we’ll see later, the key to making accurate predictions is having an adjustable forecasting process.īefore you get too excited about charting massive growth and putting new servers in place to handle the deluge, let me remind you of one of the key economic factors you need to deal with: buying equipment too early is wasteful. By putting all of this historical data into perspective, you can generate estimates for what you’ll need to sustain the growth of your website. Outside of those rare bursts and spikes of load on your system, the long-term view is hopefully one of steadily increasing usage.
It’s also the art of slicing and dicing up your historical data, and making educated guesses about the future. But let’s stop here for a moment to remember an irritating little detail: it’s impossible to accurately predict the future.įorecasting capacity needs is part intuition, and part math.
Now you’ll be able to use this data (excluding the barking statistics) like a crystal ball, and predict the future like Nostradamus. You probably didn’t gain anything from graphing the peak barking periods of your neighbor’s dog-but hey, you did it, and I’m proud of you. You’re graphing everything you can get your hands on, as often as you can. I’M ASSUMING YOU’VE MADE A FEW PASSES THROUGH Chapter 3 AND HAVE JUST DEPLOYED A SUPER-AWESOME, totally amazing, monitoring, trending, graphing, and measurement system.
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