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 webs

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.