BoxUsage

For every call, Amazon SimpleDB returns a BoxUsage value that shows the amount of system resources used by a particular operation. BoxUsage is calculated based on the make-up of your data set and the complexity of the query.

You can benchmark and optimize queries using the returned BoxUsage values. Queries with a higher BoxUsage are generally more expensive and, given a well-defined data set, you can choose the queries that provide the best performance.

	Note
	The actual execution time of any given query might vary with the rate of requests executed against your domain. Both execution time and BoxUsage are affected by the data set size. We recommend monitoring the performance of queries as data sets grow over time.