Women in Technology

Article:		The PHP Scalability Myth
Subject:		Performance NOT EQUALS to Scalable
Date:		2003-10-16 04:38:39
From:		anonymous2
Response to: Performance NOT EQUALS to Scalable
scalability is achieved either by having a "read-only" application, which can be easily deployed on multiple servers, or by having a way to distribute the changes on multiple copies of the database. It has a lot more to do with _how_ you write the application rather than which particular language, libraries or platform you choose.

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• Performance NOT EQUALS to Scalable
  2003-10-17 12:14:39  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  A lot of the 'heat' being generated here appears to stem from the absence
  of a good definition for "scalability" in the article. This is a common
  problem.
  
  Scalability is an abstact notion. So are terms like "reliability", and the
  word "performance" itself. One person's meat is another's poison. With
  regard to computer system performance, you might desire to optimize such
  metrics as, throughput, response time, or resource utilization; to name a
  few. The goal depends on the context. If you're printing reports at the end
  of the financial year, MAXIMUM throughput is likely to be your goal. In
  contrast, many web applications focus on MINIMIZING user response time.
  
  Simply put, 'scalability' is a relation among variables (performance
  metrics) that characterizes the rate of diminishing returns as the
  dimensions of the system are increased. This means that scalability can
  actually be expressed in a mathematical form. I've tried to illuminate this
  point elsewhere http://www.perfdynamics.com/papers.html. Specifially,
  http://www.teamquest.com/html/gunther/fitting.shtml and
  http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/cs.DC/0210017 should be of interest.
  
  --Neil Gunther
  

• Performance NOT EQUALS to Scalable
  2003-10-17 10:03:55  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  YES! And, I think this is what Herrington's trying to get at -- the language differences don't matter as much as the application design. Both Java and PHP provide tools, albeit different ones, to solve a wide variety of design problems. So you can factor out the language itself, and you're left with *design* as the critical factor to scalability.