Performance vs. Scalability
One key theme in distributed application design is the tradeoff between performance and scalability. Performance is a measure of the application’s speed, whereas scalability indicates how this speed varies as the client load increases or the server hardware is upgraded.
We’ve already considered one example of the difference between performance and scalability with session state. In ASP (the previous version of ASP.NET), Web pages that use session state almost always perform faster for small numbers of clients. Somewhere along the way, however, as the number of simultaneous clients increases, they reach a bottleneck and perform terribly. Figure 10-1 diagrams this relationship.
Figure 10-1. Performance vs. scalability
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