NYCPHP Meetup

[George Schlossnagle]

On Jul 13, 2004, at 2:33 PM, Sol wrote:
> Sorry for bringing this back but I still don't
> understand this "SCALABILITY" thing. The more I read
> you guyz, the more I get confused about the whole
> thing.

What don't you get about it precisely?

Chris' statement had a bunch of fluff to it, but his basic argument (or 
at least my paraphrase of it) is that stateless applications have 
infinite horizontal scalability since they persist no data from request 
to request.

Of course this ignores the point that you often have to persist data 
from request to request, which is why I find that general argument to 
be a bit fluffy.  Many (most?) applications need both some 
intra-session inter-request data  persistence as well as inter-session 
data persistance.  Simply saying 'its someone else's reponsibility' 
(mysql or whatever) is a cop-out, because you still need your whole 
application to run.  It's like saying that my car can do 400 mph, it 
just needs the right engine.

George