Is there a name for this effect in an abstract sense? I see it pop up a lot where the gains from scaling are super-linear to the scale itself. Or is it just called "economies of scale".
Marginal cost of production? If we take "energy consumption" to mean "cost", and "serving web requests" to mean "production", then your fixed cost is the idle energy load, and the marginal cost is how much more energy you would need to serve an additional request.
He didn't really scale up to get from 1 RPS to 12 RPS. It's just that he was already invested in a scale (full PC build drawing heaps of idle power) that didn't match his requirements.
i.e. it's faster for a Tesla to go 5km than a plane when both are from rest. That doesn't mean that you've scaled up by using a Tesla to get there faster.
You aren't going 12x faster by choosing the Tesla. You're just not going 12x slower. It's hard to write into words, but it's a dumb thing to say.
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