scalable != big

There's been a lot of confusion lately due to people adopting the word
"scalable" as a fancy way to say "big."  When you design something so
it works in a huge configuration, you sell it with the buzzword
"scalability."

The misnomer peaks in a recent letter in LWN that talks about the
tradeoff between scalability and ability to work in a small
configuration.

There's no tradeoff.  If Solaris works great in a 64 processor system,
but isn't practical with 3 processors, it isn't scalable.  It's just
big.  Scalable means it works as well big as it does small.

So lets not talk about sacrificing performance on small Linux systems
for scalability.  Let's talk about sacrificing performance on small
systems for performance on large systems.  I.e. let's talk about
making sure Linux is scalable.

-- 
Bryan Henderson                                    Phone 408-621-2000
San Jose, California