Scalability
Scalability is the ability of a design to accommodate a wide range of configurations.
When you add elements to a system to support increased capacity you often expect the sustainable load to be linear with respect to the elements added.
However this is rarely the case.
In fact the more common phenomena observed is referred to as the knee.
The "Knee" occurs when the performance curve flattens out suddenly and shows no appreciable performance with the addition of elements designed to enhance it.
This is usually caused by unforeseen bottlenecks elsewhere in the system that throttle performance.
A goal in system engineering is to identify these elements early and provide for their extensibility proportional to other capacity enhancing components.
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2/19/2007 10:41:34 PM
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