The ability of a system, network, or process, to handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner or its ability to be enlarged to accommodate that growth.
Scalability is the capability to increase resources to yield a linear (ideally) increase in service capacity. The key characteristic of a scalable application is that additional load only requires additional resources rather than extensive modification of the application itself.
Although raw performance makes a difference in determining the number of users that an application can support, scalability and performance are two separate entities. In fact, performance efforts can sometimes be opposed to scalability efforts.
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A system whose performance improves after adding hardware, proportionally to the capacity added, is said to be a scalable system. An algorithm, design, networking protocol, program, or other system is said to scale, if it is suitably efficient and practical when applied to large situations (e.g. a large input data set or a large number of participating nodes in the case of a distributed system). If the design fails when the quantity increases, it does not scale.
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Scalability is a general quality that holds when the system continues to satisfy its requirements when various usage parameters are increased.
E.g., a file server might be scalable to a high number of users, or to very large files or very high capacity disks.
Scalability goals:
- Performance under load
This is a specific type of scalability goal dealing with the performance of the system at times when it is servicing many requests from many users. - Large data volume
This is a specific type of scalability goal dealing with the ability for the system to handle large data sets. Operations should continue to be correct and efficient as data set size increases. Furthermore, the user interface should still be usable as the data presented to users increases in length.
