The becquerel as an SI unit for request rate

The proposal

It has been reported that kqr argued for a simple change in how we talk about request rates: specify the period, and use the second as the unit. Dashboards that hide the period and let aggregation vary by zoom level are a known nuisance — allegedly you can get a higher rate by zooming out, lower by zooming in. Be precise, kqr says: measure requests per second. Don’t be one of those people who still talk in requests per minute.

Hertz or becquerel?

There’s a neat semantic fork in the road. Hertz (Hz) is one event every second, and so is the becquerel (Bq). But Hz carries a whiff of metronomes and sine waves; people hear 4 Hz and think “precisely every 250 ms.” The becquerel, by contrast, is tied to radioactive decay — stochastic, messy, Poisson-y. That makes it a surprisingly good analogy for organic web traffic: noisy, bursty, only predictable on average. Load-testing? Use Hz. Real user traffic? Maybe call it Bq.

Why this matters (and why it’s slightly delightful)

There’s a practical, almost petty pleasure here. “90 kBq” is a lot cleaner than “90,000 requests/s.” A reader even suggested inventing “rips” — charming, but kqr is cheekily trying to bend SI to fit our lives and, it has been reported, will keep using becquerels for request rates. Is that wrong, or just refreshingly nerdy? Either way, this little skirmish over units says something larger: engineers crave shared definitions. If we can agree on a second as the base period, the rest is just arguing about labels — and that, frankly, is half the fun.

Sources: entropicthoughts.com, Hacker News