[rallison]

I completely get that. I responded to the parent because he introduced the 20,000 req/s number as a comparison point.

The Google test is both a theoretical max throughput (that one wouldn't reach under basically any normal use case) and a test of the load balancer capabilities. The Netflix 20,000 req/s number is, instead, a real use case example.

My point was that one shouldn't directly compare those numbers and say, for example, that this GCE setup has 50x better throughput than Netflix.

I imagine that if Netflix were to stub all of their API calls with noops that returned 1 byte responses, they would be able to handle significantly more than 20,000 req/s. Basically, I don't think we actually disagree here.