--- Brad Pauly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Good question! This has been on my mind some for a current project
> and now I have thought about it even more. Hmm, I'm not sure how to
> quote a blog. To paraphrase (hope you don't mind), Chris's
> definition of something that scales well is when resources (in
> general things that cost money) grow either linearly or
> logarithmically as the number of users grows. I agree with this as
> long as the slope of the linear graph is close to or less than 1.
Yes, I considered adding an extra condition to the linear case that the rate of
growth should be less than or equal to 1/1. I tries to keep things as simple as
possible, however, so that my discussion didn't make matters worse. :-)
> Some of the factors that I would consider for determining if a
> technology will scale well for a web application are: it's ease of
> use (how hard is it to develop in), general performance (it can't be
> a complete dog, however, small discrepancies compared to similar
> technologies are usually ok), and how well can you spread it out
> (scalable web applications are often in a multi-server environment).
I disagree about the performance part, but I feel like I am alone. As an
example, take a train versus a sports car. The train is probably a lot slower,
so it performs worse. However, the train scales much better than the sports car
when you start talking about hauling weight. Tie a rail car to the sports car
and see what happens. :-)
So, I think scalability is relative to the performance of the solution. A long
distance runner is more scalable than a sprinter, even though a sprinter
probably runs faster. In some cases, I'm sure the faster solution also scales
better, but I don't think this is necessarily the case.
> Do others consider application design when talking about scalability?
Absolutely, but only when looking at the complete solution. When people talk
about whether something like PHP is scalable, I try to isolate programming
languages in an "all else being equal" perspective.
Anyway, thanks for your thoughts.
Chris
=====
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http://shiflett.org/
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