Discussion on: Handling complex MVC applications - How to scale and avoid Controller chaos

[Sam Parton]

I dont want to be "that guy" but... usually when we talk about scale-ability, its in terms of load balancing etc.

What you're referencing is maintainability, right? this is something that would confuse a lot of newcomers.

I could be wrong, I'm open to hear how if so.

If its not maintainability, then how does refactoring blocks of code make your project more scalable?

It makes it more readable and ofcourse, better to maintain when we go past a certain stage and our project is no longer a baby.

However, it doesn't reduce database load, improve the amount of connections our application can handle and so on.

[Paul Isaris]

Hey Sam,
I agree with your point of view. By "Scaling", I essentially mean to prepare the app not only for more users and DB rows, but for new client requirements and Business Logic.
Sure load balancing will be a nice solution If you plan to make your 100 usres to be 10000. But will not help you much with new business requirements.
So yes, by "Scaling" I do mean "Easy to maintain and grow in terms of business requirements".

[Sam Parton]

However, just to provide some code examples in Laravel.

An unscalable chunk of code(in my opinion) would be this:

$users = User::get();

foreach($users as $user) {
    $user->name = 'Bob'; // We set them all the same name for example
    $user->save(); //This would be a query for each user
}

If we had 100 users, this would be 101 queries.

//Instead, for this example, we could just call this:

User::update(['name' => 'bob']); 

Resulting in just one query.