Although a server configuration may perform well with a few users, response times can increase as the number of connected users increases. Scalability is a measure of how many simultaneous users your application and server configuration can support under prescribed use patterns before response times increase to unacceptable levels. Throughput is a measure of how many operations the server or application can process in a given time period; for example, database transactions per second or Web server page requests per second.
Throughput can be useful in comparing benchmark results for servers from different vendors, but scalability is a more useful measurement for tuning a given application deployment. You can directly measure the number of users and response times. End users are usually more concerned about how quickly their own work gets done than they are about overall server performance.
