manuel-rhdt

As a German, my experience is that the typical use of "wenn" is more often synonymous to the English "if", rather than the English "when". The meaning of "wenn" is contextual. Using "wenn" to for conditionals is not a mistake of everyday speech but rather a feature of the language.

The other German word "falls" is sometimes also translated as "if" but it carries a slightly different connotation. In typical use "falls" is used for an unlikely condition: "falls es morgen regnen sollte" -> "if it were to rain tomorrow". If "wenn" was used instead of "falls", the connotation would be more like a 50/50 probability. In the end, the if/when split of English is really not the same as the falls/wenn split of German. For computer programming "wenn" would likely have been preferred by German programmers.

The Bq suggestion doesn’t actually fix anything. Becquerel is defined as one decay event per second and is dimensionally identical to Hz. Using Bq typically signals that a poisson process is being measured which is itself an assumption about the arrival statistics. This assumption is likely wrong for real web traffic (which tends to be bursty rather than memoryless).

More importantly, the claim that Hz is inappropriate for non-periodic phenomena is false. Many random processes have a well-defined Fourier transform, and reporting the intensity of random fluctuations in a frequency-range is standard across signal processing, neuroscience, finance, and physics. The unit doesn’t imply periodicity of the process itself. It implies that we are working in the Fourier domain, which applies as much to periodic signals as to stochastic processes.

If you want to characterize web request traffic properly, the right question is what the arrival process actually looks like. A single scalar whether in Hz or Bq throws away almost all of that. In all cases, you have to think carefully what your underlying assumptions are and what the reported number actually measures.