Scalability : About
Posted by carl.reitschuster on January 26th, 2007
Hi reader,
after a benchmarking test of Components of a CRM System with Oracle 10.2 and Sun Solaris with either AMD Opteron or Sun SPARC IV+ CPU’s i started to think about the definition of Scalability. Her it is:
Scalability is about how strong the increase
of the Throughput/decrease of Response Time
of an Application or Software Component is
when additional resources of CPU, Memory and I/O are added;
A second one follows :
Scalability is about how strong the decrease
of the Throughput/increase of Response Time
of an Application or Software Component is
when the workload ( Amount of work, Amount of Concurrency ) increases;
Karl Reitschuster
February 26th, 2007 at 23:10
Being a software (rather than hardware) kinda guy, I think the latter definition is the one that matter most. I always find the workload usually increases much faster than the resources needed to handle it.
February 27th, 2007 at 07:40
Hi Stew, your observation is simply true. But as as software guy you should point more to the the first definition. You can write software which uses and handles resources in such a bad way that increase of resources has almost no effect. So the better the software answer to incresaed resources the more scalable it is. cheers Karl
PS.: Had to write a study of an reporting system. Even with 24CPU, 96G of Ram and fast storage the Throughput did not increase any more. Because of the very bad software scalability.
PS.:PS.: So i see scalability in software and hardware.