How do you balance scalability and performance in your system design and architecture?

由人工智能和领英社区提供技术支持

Scalability and performance are two key non-functional requirements that affect the quality and usability of your system. However, they are not always easy to balance, as they may involve trade-offs and compromises in your system design and architecture. In this article, you will learn some tips and best practices to achieve both scalability and performance in your system, without compromising on other aspects such as reliability, security, and maintainability.

此文章中的业界达人

由社区从 5 条内容中精选。了解更多

Tom Fairlie

Systems & Human Factors Engineering Leadership

1 What are scalability and performance?

Scalability is the ability of your system to handle increasing or varying amounts of load, such as users, requests, data, or transactions, without degrading its functionality or quality. Performance is the measure of how fast, efficient, and responsive your system is, such as how long it takes to process a request, how much resources it consumes, or how well it meets the expectations of the users. Both scalability and performance depend on various factors, such as the system requirements, the design decisions, the implementation details, the testing methods, and the deployment environment.

添加您的观点

Kemi Lewis

Getting Magic Done Practitioner | C-Suite Advisor | Systems Engineering Yoda| Chief Systems Engineer | IFEC Expert | Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Brown Belt
举报内容
Start by defining clear scalability and performance requirements. Design modular architectures that allow for horizontal scaling without sacrificing performance. Use load balancing to distribute workloads efficiently. Optimize critical code paths and database queries for speed. Employ caching mechanisms to reduce load times. Continuously monitor system metrics to identify bottlenecks. Prioritize components that impact both scalability and performance. Make smart trade-offs to achieve the best of both. Stay focused, execute efficiently, and get it done.

已翻译

赞

2 Why are scalability and performance important?

Scalability and performance are important because they affect the user experience, the business value, and the operational cost of your system. A scalable and performant system can handle more users and transactions, provide faster and smoother service, and generate more revenue and customer satisfaction. On the other hand, a system that lacks scalability and performance can suffer from poor quality, low availability, high latency, and high resource consumption, which can lead to user frustration, lost opportunities, and increased expenses.

添加您的观点

Tom Fairlie

Systems & Human Factors Engineering Leadership
举报内容
It's really important to balance performance and scalability against the need and the cost of implementing them. We generally tend to focus on either providing great performance of lowering cost. However, it's more likely that system functions will benefit from a graduated scale of performance, where some should get little attention, some more, and some a lot. Keeping the granularity low should allow designers to focus on areas where the cost/benefit of implementing high performance pays for itself.

已翻译

赞

3 How do you measure scalability and performance?

To balance scalability and performance, you need to measure them objectively and consistently. You can use various metrics and tools to evaluate how your system behaves under different load and stress conditions, such as throughput, response time, error rate, resource utilization, and efficiency. You can also use benchmarks and standards to compare your system with other similar systems or with the industry best practices. You should define clear and realistic goals and criteria for your scalability and performance requirements, and monitor and test them regularly throughout the system development lifecycle.

添加您的观点

Tom Fairlie

Systems & Human Factors Engineering Leadership
举报内容
While response time is probably the most user-centric metric in this list, I think it's vital to understand the user impact as well. This may be difficult to express via requirements (at least upfront), but can be readily measured in free-from or validation testing. For example, if three functions have response times of <1 second, it's possible that the user could tolerate response times of up to 3 seconds for two of them, but would experience negative impacts if the third was >0.3 seconds. Thus, it may be reasonable to avoid universal performance metrics and instead create unique or perhaps class-based requirements based on the actual usability impacts to the user.

已翻译

赞

4 How do you design for scalability and performance?

In order to achieve scalability and performance, it is necessary to begin the design process with these aspects in mind. You should adhere to some general principles and patterns, like modularizing your system into loosely coupled and cohesive components that can be scaled independently, distributing your system across multiple nodes, servers, or regions to share the load and provide redundancy and fault tolerance, optimizing your system for concurrency and parallelism with techniques like multithreading, multiprocessing, or asynchronous programming, caching data and computations to reduce the frequency and latency of accessing external resources, using data structures and algorithms that suit your system's functionality and complexity while avoiding unnecessary or redundant operations, and selecting the right technologies and platforms that match your system's needs and capabilities.

添加您的观点

Tom Fairlie

Systems & Human Factors Engineering Leadership
举报内容
Design patterns for scalable performance are important. However, it may be equally important to focus on the user experience (UX), since users may anticipate or passively allow average performance in some applications (e.g., email) while having zero tolerance in others (e.g., streaming video). Understanding the UX for every use case may allow the designers to make some tradeoffs more easily, assuming that they there is commensurate attention paid to walking the user comfortably through the areas with less adequate performance or scalability.

已翻译

赞

5 How do you improve scalability and performance?

Even if you design your system for scalability and performance, you may still encounter challenges and issues that affect these aspects. To ensure optimal performance, it is important to continuously monitor and analyze your system's behavior, using tools such as profilers, debuggers, or loggers. Additionally, collecting feedback from users and stakeholders through surveys, interviews, or analytics can help identify areas and components that need improvement or optimization. Common techniques and strategies to consider include refactoring code to eliminate bugs, improve readability, and enhance maintainability; tuning parameters and configurations to adjust system behavior and resource allocation; upgrading hardware or software to increase capacity and efficiency; adopting new technologies or platforms that offer better scalability and performance features; and experimenting with different solutions to find the optimal trade-off between scalability and performance.

添加您的观点

Tom Fairlie

Systems & Human Factors Engineering Leadership
举报内容
When specifying scalability and performance, it is important to identify all factors that may impact them in the future, even if they are not apparent on Day 1. This will ensure that the system's foundation is robust enough to handle increasing workloads. As the system is tested and piloted, it is important to analyze these factors (perhaps through synthetic testing) and collect real-world performance data to provide feedback to the original specification. Optimizing the design in the early stages will be easier (and cheaper) than discovering them during a robust buildout. Modeling and simulation may help (if affordable), but fleshing out the original concept as far as possible will help the most.

已翻译

赞

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?

添加您的观点

System Requirements

+ 关注

给文章评分

我们借助人工智能创建了此文章。您认为这篇文章怎么样？

很棒不太好

举报此文章

查看全部

How do you balance scalability and performance in your system design and architecture?

1

2

3

4

5

6

1 What are scalability and performance?

2 Why are scalability and performance important?

3 How do you measure scalability and performance?

4 How do you design for scalability and performance?

5 How do you improve scalability and performance?

6 Here’s what else to consider

System Requirements

给文章评分

感谢您的反馈

更多System Requirements相关文章

更多相关阅读内容