the steady-state load on a system might be significantly different than the startup or periodic load. Imagine a farm of app servers booting up. Every single one needs to connect to a database and load some amount of reference or seed data. Every one starts with a cold cache and only gradually gets to a useful working set. Until then, most HTTP requests translate into one or more database queries. That means the transient load on the database is much higher when applications start up than after they’ve been running for a while.
