109 ms·

"Scalability is far more about keeping things running than it is about making things fast" The need to state these facts is further evidence that this is an ar

by lucifer 17y ago

"Scalability is far more about keeping things running than it is about making things fast" The need to state these facts is further evidence that this is an arts and crafts industry (and not scientific). Imagine physicist saying "Inertia should not be confused with momentum".

patio11 17y ago
Inertia and momentum are not just different points on the same continuum. "Keeping things running" and "making things fast" are, at least as the author is using the term scalability. Look at the graph of response time versus number of operations included in the article. It says "As the site gets busier, performance is impacted negatively to the point where it compromises the user experience". That is virtually the definition of a scalability problem (more scale = boom!) without ever requiring the system to stop running. I suppose you could arbitrarily redefine scalability such that problems caused by scale which did not cause the server to crash were not scalability problems, but your redefinition would not contribute to professionalizing the field of web development.
- lucifer 17y ago
  I don't think 'response-time' and 'scalability' are merely differentiated degrees of a given scalar, either. Scalability is a multi-dimensional measure, which incorporates 'response-time'. "professionalizing the field of web development" I think this touches on a key differentiator of our chosen profession. Nearly every other (industrial) professional field (with the exception of Architecture, which shares many of the characteristics of Software "engineering" in sharing a hazy boundary between 'art' and 'science') has a tiered body of workers that rests on a fairly commoditized implementation base. (Consider your precious laptop. Put together by workers with high-school education.) I don't see how we can "professionalize" [software] development (in terms of actual producers of ubiquitous software artifacts) unless we have programs writing programs.
- smokinn 17y ago
  No, it isn't. People in our industry commonly use the word scalability to denote metrics such as response time but that's just plain wrong. You can have a website that takes 3 minutes to load yet still be scalable. As long as it takes 3 minutes to load when you have a single user, 3 minutes at 1000 users and 3 mintes at 1 million you have a scalable website. Scalability is all about keeping the same (or at least close) performance as your load increases. If you want to know more about scalability I suggest you read Theo Schlossnagle's excellent Scalable Internet Architectures book.
lallysingh 17y ago
That's pretty harsh -- Scalability is pretty new and fairly unknown in this industry. It's not taught in schools the same way OO is taught. On the other hand, it'd be pretty strange if a blog post had to mention the definition for encapsulation. That stuff seems pretty well-known and agreed.

by lucifer 17y ago

patio11 17y ago

Inertia and momentum are not just different points on the same continuum. "Keeping things running" and "making things fast" are, at least as the author is using the term scalability. Look at the graph of response time versus number of operations included in the article. It says "As the site gets busier, performance is impacted negatively to the point where it compromises the user experience". That is virtually the definition of a scalability problem (more scale = boom!) without ever requiring the system to stop running. I suppose you could arbitrarily redefine scalability such that problems caused by scale which did not cause the server to crash were not scalability problems, but your redefinition would not contribute to professionalizing the field of web development.

lucifer 17y ago
I don't think 'response-time' and 'scalability' are merely differentiated degrees of a given scalar, either. Scalability is a multi-dimensional measure, which incorporates 'response-time'. "professionalizing the field of web development" I think this touches on a key differentiator of our chosen profession. Nearly every other (industrial) professional field (with the exception of Architecture, which shares many of the characteristics of Software "engineering" in sharing a hazy boundary between 'art' and 'science') has a tiered body of workers that rests on a fairly commoditized implementation base. (Consider your precious laptop. Put together by workers with high-school education.) I don't see how we can "professionalize" [software] development (in terms of actual producers of ubiquitous software artifacts) unless we have programs writing programs.
smokinn 17y ago
No, it isn't. People in our industry commonly use the word scalability to denote metrics such as response time but that's just plain wrong. You can have a website that takes 3 minutes to load yet still be scalable. As long as it takes 3 minutes to load when you have a single user, 3 minutes at 1000 users and 3 mintes at 1 million you have a scalable website. Scalability is all about keeping the same (or at least close) performance as your load increases. If you want to know more about scalability I suggest you read Theo Schlossnagle's excellent Scalable Internet Architectures book.

lallysingh 17y ago

That's pretty harsh -- Scalability is pretty new and fairly unknown in this industry. It's not taught in schools the same way OO is taught. On the other hand, it'd be pretty strange if a blog post had to mention the definition for encapsulation. That stuff seems pretty well-known and agreed.