Aug 29, 2010

What is Scalability ?

In common terms, you develop an application expecting that it will at max can have a concurrency of 100 users or approx. 3000 hits per day and contrary to that, same application starts to get hit in excess of 10000 users daily and is increasing by day. 

If you are able to cover up this increase in no.of users by adding more machines then you are doing 'Horizontal Scaling' on the other hand if you are adding up more powerful CPU or RAM then you are doing 'Vertical Scaling'. Hence, scaling is nothing but increasing resources to accommodate the increase in load.
When a system or web application is able or flexible enough to allow this increase in resources it is known as 'Scalable' and is known to have 'Scalability'.

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