Infrastructure refers to the fundamental (internal) functions of Intershop 7/Intershop Commerce Management that do not primarily constitute business features but support them. This includes, for example

• build, assembly and deployment
• managed service framework
• logging framework
• messaging
• ORM engine
• configuration framework
• ...

Scalability is the ability of a system to handle increased traffic or data load without impact on the system performance, and the ability to be easily maintained and enhanced. There are two scalability methods for improving the performance:

• scaling vertically, adding more resources such as CPU, memory, and disk space to a single machine
• scaling horizontally, adding more machines to the cluster that runs the application and shares the load

Generally, the performance of an e-commerce software is one of the major criteria for its market acceptance. Customers expect quick response times when visiting a web shop, and the owner of the e-commerce software wants to optimize the operational efforts and costs.

With respect to Intershop 7/Intershop Commerce Management, performance and scalability measures apply to the following areas on different levels:

• application architecture
• application design, incl. coding guidelines
• cluster configuration
• database server tuning
• application server settings
• OS tuning