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tstirrat15 merged 1 commit into from
Nov 3, 2026
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docs: explain logical checks for SpiceDB compute sizing #602

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5 changes: 5 additions & 0 deletions app/spicedb/ops/load-testing/page.mdx
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Expand Up @@ -361,6 +361,11 @@ By far, the most common sign you need to scale your datastore up or out is high

### Scaling the SpiceDB Compute

Use logical checks per second as the baseline workload measure when sizing SpiceDB compute.
A logical check represents an individual permission check: a `CheckPermission` request counts as one, while a `CheckBulkPermissions` request containing 100 checks counts as 100.
Monitor the rate of the `spicedb_services_logical_checks_total` counter across your deployment's replicas, and use representative load tests to determine the compute needed to meet your latency requirements.
Compute cost per logical check varies with schema complexity, relationship fanout, consistency settings, and cache utilization.

Like the datastore, it’s important to scale if CPU utilization is high; however, since SpiceDB is such a performance sensitive workload, we've seen significant performance gains from scaling out CPU in nodes that we’re experiencing less than 30% CPU utilization.

## How Authzed helps with Load Testing SpiceDB
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2 changes: 2 additions & 0 deletions app/spicedb/ops/observability/page.mdx
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Expand Up @@ -20,6 +20,8 @@ A [Prometheus metrics endpoint][prom-endpoint] can be found on this server at th

Available metrics include operational information about the Go runtime and serving metrics for any servers that are enabled.

For guidance on using the `spicedb_services_logical_checks_total` counter to size SpiceDB compute, see [Scaling the SpiceDB Compute](/spicedb/ops/load-testing#scaling-the-spicedb-compute).

A [Grafana dashboard][grafana-dashboard] is available for visualizing these metrics.

[command]: /spicedb/concepts/commands
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