Scalability

[Arpan]

What does the term "scalability of an application" mean?

Thanks,

Arpan

 

[Ray at]

How well your application will work as the demand on it increases.

i.e. You can make a web-based app that is coded very poorly from an
efficiency point of view, and if only one person is using the app, it won't
really matter. But, if your site gets really busy and suddenly 50,000
people are using it, you will see that the application is not very scalable
if it was coded poorly.

Ray at work

 

[Mark Schupp]

In addition to Ray's response "scalability" also includes the ability to add
additional hardware resources to increase the number of users.

For instance:
session variables are considered an impediment to scalability because they
use server memory to hold data and memory may be limited. Also session
variables are not shared between web-servers in a web-farm so you cannot
improve things just by adding more servers (there are some work-arounds for
this however).

Keeping session data in a database is considered "scaleable" because you can
easily add web-servers to increase capacity. This is a more "scalable"
solution than session variables even though it may require more hardware
support for each individual user than using session variables would (SQL
statement execution vs memory access).

 

[Arpan]

I have got to confess that you as well as Ray have given a very good
explanation & instances to make me understand the term "scalability". Thanks
to both of you for the same

Regards to you & Ray,

Arpan