website scaling?

[dadamssg87]

This topic has always kind of confused me. What are people generally referring to when they talk about this. The code itself? or more of going from shared servers to dedicated servers?

[Philip]

It can be both, depending on context.

 

Scaling the code means how easy is it to expand & add new features, whereas application (in this case website) scaling can be viewed as a graph of "X more resources are required when there is Y more load?". Typically its the latter, and people are wondering how well your application can handle higher loads

[jawef]

I strongly believe that scaling is something that written theory (even in internet) is far behind real word examples. I am not referring to technical scaling (since I have little to do with these) like servers, that I believe is the easy part if you have the money, but in the programming – analysis’s aspect. Let me remind that few years ago “cashing” was something wrong in languages like PHP and this point of view was the dominant. First of all you should use a good testing framework and do a lot of tests in your own. There are few basics (that not everyone agrees) but to find your way you should make your own tests. And let me point one other aspect that is rarely mentioned, a good scaling technique in one application – site might not work as well in another.