Introduction

Nobody will bother too much if a web page takes too long to open, or try to access a site that is unresponsive due to too much simultaneous accesses—people will just close it and navigate somewhere else. With the advances in broadband speed in the last few years, people expect to see things rapidly; there's no excuse for slowness. And that's precisely what this chapter is about.

Performance is how fast we get results, and scalability is how well our system behaves if we have lots of simultaneous requests. Not exactly the same, but related.

Let's go through the options we have.