Scaling Next.js Applications
Scaling is not simply adding more application servers. You must understand which parts of the application are stateless, where sessions live, how caches behave, how database connections are managed, and which workloads can become bottlenecks.
A horizontally scaled application should avoid storing important user state only in process memory unless that behavior is intentionally local.
Database connection management becomes especially important when many server instances can start simultaneously.
Key Takeaways
- Design application servers to be horizontally scalable when required.
- Do not depend on process-local state for shared application state.
- Database and cache architecture often becomes the real scaling bottleneck.