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Discussion on: Performance Vs Scalability

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vorakl

It's a good post!

Scalability is being able to handle large amounts of users/data/traffic

I would only add that "scalability" is an ability not to handle but to scale when more resources were added. In other words, when a system is able to take and utilize resources which were added. That's why, basically, adding more hosts/memory/CPUs/etc doesn't mean a system will keep performing well. Being able to handle a large amount of something doesn't always require to be scalable. There are examples of systems which handle a lot of traffic but they are not really scalable and there are examples of scalable systems which need this property for other reasons than "large amount of", for example, redundancy...