"How To" Guides for Computers

Horizontal scalability (more processors) vs. vertical scalability (faster processors)

There are a number of advantages of vertical scalability (faster processors) over horizontal scalability (more processors):

For a lot of software, license costs and maintenance fees depend on the number of processors where the software is running, and, in some cases, the size of the processors. In the cases where the size of the processors is a factor, the cost for a 2x processor is seldom twice that of a 1x processor. Where the sofware costs depend only on the number of processors regardless of size, it's a no-brainer; the cost increases when adding more processors, but not when adding faster ones.
Upgrading to faster processors provides as much improvement in throughput (see calculations below) as adding enough additional processors to reach the same total MIPs . Even if the original processors must be removed and the one-time purchase price of the new ones is more than adding more processors of the same speed, the reduction in ongoing software costs can easily offset that expense.
Faster processors can improve response time and reduce transaction queue wait times, while additional processors can only do so if transactions can be split across processors so that they can run in parallel. As a result, scaling vertically is more likely to provide noticeable improvements, such as making web pages load faster.

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