Ah I did not realize that it's not on EBS (aws announced SSD EBS last June so I thought perhaps you guys jumped on that opportunity). What's the max # of connections? Does it scale with storage as well?
You might find the HikariCP guidance on connection pools with SSD interesting. Less disk waiting can mean a much smaller pool is optimal, to avoid unnecessary context switching, among other things.
We're tuning the connection limits during beta, but it's not something we typically scale. We set that as high as we can without hurting stability, and then let people shoot themselves in the foot if they want. :)
If you use it and run into connection limit issues, let us know and we'll gladly up them for you.
https://github.com/brettwooldridge/HikariCP/wiki/About-Pool-...