AdvancedScaling & Performance

Lab: scale deliberately

Apply measure-first, the scaling axes, statelessness, and bottleneck reasoning.

Lab · optionalFundamentalsAdvanced9 min

Recommended first

By the end of this lesson you will be able to:

Optional scenario lab. Scaling is a measured decision, not a reflex. Practice the reasoning.

1.
An endpoint feels slow. Before optimising or adding servers, you should:
Guess which part is slow and rewrite itProfile and measure to find the real bottleneckAdd more servers immediatelyRewrite the whole thing in a faster language
2.
Adding more identical machines behind a load balancer is:
Vertical scalingHorizontal scalingCachingSharding
3.
Horizontal scaling is cleanest when your services are:
Stateful (keep user data in local memory)Stateless (any instance can handle any request)Written in CRunning on one big server
4.
Fixing an O(n squared) algorithm can do more for performance than adding hardware.
TrueFalse

Measure first, scale out with stateless services, and remember the biggest lever is often the algorithm.

Finished reading? Mark it complete to track your progress.

Load testing and bottlenecks

Prove your system holds up under realistic load — before your users do it for you.