Spotfire's web architecture scales amazingly well. The Web Player shares parts of the analysis files and data between multiple users in order to make the most efficient use of the hardware resources available.
Furthermore, the node manager and service instance architecture has many benefits over traditional load balancing. The chief advantage is that it is context-aware. Traditional load balancers have variations on round-robin or least utilized sharing algorithms (and more besides, but we will focus on the simple ones for the purposes of this example). In the case of these traditional load balancers, they will assign users to individual servers in turn (round- robin) or allocate a new user to the least used server in the cluster.
The disadvantage of the traditional load-balancing scheme is that, eventually, all the servers will most likely...
