SCALABILITY

how well a system performs as it grows. For example, a central server of some kind with ten clients may perform efficiently. It has a scalability problem if it fails with an increasing number of clients. If the average response time probably scales linearly with the number of clients, it has a complexity of O(N) ("order N"). The October 1997 issue of Application Development Trends (ISSN 1073-9564) on Page 13 describes the IBM DB2 "Web-enabled database which potentially lets customers scale from desktop or laptop systems to massively parallel processors." See Database .