Scalability is your web application's ability to handle a growing number of concurrent users. Explore our analysis of how scalable a web app needs to be. Will it be intended for small scale intranet usage of tens to hundreds of concurrent users, or do you plan to reach for a medium size global web application such as 500px and gmail with about 1000-3000 concurrent users.
We took a practical approach and studied what kind of pain points one typically encounters on the way to building a scalable web application. Our study provides answers for example to the following questions: how much memory is needed to serve a specific amount of concurrent users with a given session size (see Figure below), which garbage collector you should use, and how to optimize your cpu, memory, and database.
Memory need for varying size sessions and a different number of concurrent users.
We used readily available Vaadin example application and made it scale from an initial few hundred concurrent users to several thousands. After reading our study of web application scalability, you should be able to beat several pain points in a way to scale up your web application.
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