I\'ve heard that people say that they\'ve made a scalable web application..
What really is scaling?
What can be done by developers to make their
May I suggest a "User-Centric" definition;
Scalable applications provide a consistent level of experience to each user irrespective of the number of users.
For web applications this means 24/7 anywhere in the world. However, given the diversity of the available bandwidth around the world and developer's lack of control over its performance and availability, we may re-define it as follows:
Scalable web applications provide a consistent response time, measured at the server TCP port in use, irrespective of the number of requests.
To achieve this the developer must avoid or remove all performance bottle-necks. Currently the most challenging issue is the scalability of distributed RDBMS systems.