Few questions if you will, it's an interesting work and I figure you're on ScyllaDB team?
1. Is 5s experiment with 1s warmup really a representative workload? How about running for several minutes or tens of minutes? Do you observe the same result?
2. How about 256 connections on 16 vCPUs creating contention against each other and therefore skewing the experiment results? Aren't they competing for the same resources against each other?
3. Are the experiment results reproducible on different machines (at first use the same and then similar SW+HW configurations)?
4. How many times is experiment (benchmark) repeated and what about the statistical significance of the observed results? How do you make sure to understand that what you're observing, and hence drawing a conclusion out of it in the end, is really what you thought you were measuring?