← Lab
hpalag
confirmedKubernetes · minikubeCluster & infrastructureJuly 8, 2026
the question
How fast does the Kubernetes HPA actually react to a CPU spike?
what came out
A median ~56 seconds -- ~40x longer than a pod takes to start -- because the delay is the metrics-scrape plus sync sampling loop, not pod startup. It scales only on the first scraped sample above target. Real minikube, pre-registered, independently verified.
method & receipts
- Result: confirmed
- Pre-registered — the prediction was written down and committed before the run.
- Reproducible — one script re-runs the whole thing from scratch.
- Independently reviewed — an adversarial review pass, kept in the repo.
- Machine-readable claims — every reported number, in a checkable file.
- Tested — a correctness/benchmark suite ships alongside the code.
→ read the code and re-run it
github.com/v-code01/hpalag