Measuring Load and Performance

Scaling a system is critical to coping with the increasing load imposed on it. For example, think of our hypothetical My Cool App’s growth—it is now a billion-dollar company.

Initially, when the My Cool App had a few hundred concurrent users, handling the load using $3$ to $5$ nodes with a decent amount of resources was not an issue. Life was simple and beautiful.

Things changed with the fame of the app. More and more people started to use My Cool App and within a short period of time, the system started to see $100k$ concurrent users. This increased load definitely requires scaling.

Note: To scale a system, you need to define the load and performance of your system. Based on the numbers you see, you decide whether to scale your system, and how far you should go with scaling.

Let’s discuss load and performance measurement.