We upgraded to the new m3.large instances type on our Amazon Web Servers at 4:15 PM today. Our average response time fell from about 100 milliseconds of time spent in the web server to about 50 milliseconds.
If you can catch that 0.05 seconds on a stopwatch, you might notice a difference. But if you multiply that by the number of times people hit our web servers in a month, it is a savings of 55 hours of wait time per month (of course this is January and with our growth we might be saving 200 hours in November!) for our users.
Yes, we are relentless in our pursuit of small, incremental improvements…