title: App Engine Megacycles/sec per F1 instance
body: <p>Automatic instance scaling depends on various factors like number of concurrent requests, cpu utilization, etc.  I would like to be able to look at the App Engine dashboard and see which factor caused the number of instances to increase.</p>
  
  <p>For cpu utilization, it is not clear what the comparison should be.  The dashboard presents cpu utilization in terms of Megacycles per second, but the autoscaling cpu utilization parameter is just a number between 0.5 and 0.95.</p>
  
  <p>From <a href="https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard#instance_classes" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a> an F1 instance apparently has a cpu limit of 600 MHz. This is frequency, not a cpu limit. Should I interpret this instead as a fully utilized F1 instance can hit 600 Megacycles per second?</p>
  
  <p>And therefore, if I set a target_cpu_utilization = 0.5, I can expect autoscaling to increase the number of instances if the dashboard shows a cpu usage of more than 300 Megacycles/sec * # instances?</p>