title: How do you do website capacity planning?
body: <p>I just read the book <a href="https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0596518579" rel="noreferrer" rel="nofollow noreferrer">The Art of Capacity planning</a> (BTW, I liked it), and in it the author explains how important is measuring your services, finding out your ceilings, forecasting your needs, ensure a easygoing deployment, etc.. etc.. But through the book he explains his experience in Flickr, where he has to face all the time the same product.</p>
  
  <p>Lot of us, we work in companies where we face small-medium project sizes for other companies. We have to understand their business, their needs, plan an architecture, a model, etc.. etc.. </p>
  
  <p>Then, the customer says "I need to support 1000 users". Well, and how many requests per second is a user? how long are their sessions? how much data do they transfer? which operations do they execute? how long are they?</p>
  
  <p>Sometimes it is possible to know those figures (monitoring their existing applications or because they have already done that measurements), sometimes it is not possible (because they do not have a current web site, or it is just to possible to know).</p>
  
  <p>How do you make a guess about the number of servers, bandwidth, storage, etc... which figures of reference do you use?</p>
  
  <p>Regards.</p>