What does it mean to say that a framework “scales well”?

Question

When reading about frameworks (.net. ruby on rails, django, spring, etc.), I keep seeing so and so does or doesn\'t scale well.

What does it mean when someone says that

Answer 1

IMHO, saying that a framework "scales well" usually means that someone in the hearsay chain was able to use it to handle lots of volume.

In parallel programming scalability is usually used to describe how an algorithm performs as it is parallelized. An algorithm that has a 1:1 speedup is a rare beast but will double in performance on twice the hardware/cpu, treble on three times the hardware/cpu, etc...

In my experience practically any framework can be made to scale given sufficient expertise.

The easier the framework is to use the greater the chance that a developer with insufficient expertise will run into scalability problems.