---
title: "Discussion on \"The Hidden Cost of Horizontal Scaling: Duplicate Work, Stale State, and Noisy Failures\" | Hashnode"
description: "Discussion on \"The Hidden Cost of Horizontal Scaling: Duplicate Work, Stale State, and Noisy Failures\". Imagine you're the engineer at Notion the week traffic doubles. The fix looks obvious: the single app server is maxed out, so you spin up nine more behind a load balancer. Ten instances instead of one"
url: "https://hashnode.com/posts/the-hidden-cost-of-horizontal-scaling-duplicate-work-stale-state-and-noisy-failures/6aa54384746953bf23850f25"
---

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# [The Hidden Cost of Horizontal Scaling: Duplicate Work, Stale State, and Noisy Failures](https://backend-bytes.hashnode.dev/the-hidden-cost-of-horizontal-scaling-duplicate-work-stale-state-and-noisy-failures?utm_source=hashnode&utm_medium=feed)

Imagine you're the engineer at Notion the week traffic doubles. The fix looks obvious: the single app server is maxed out, so you spin up nine more behind a load balancer. Ten instances instead of one

Sep 12 · 8 min read · backend-bytes.hashnode.dev  
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-   [#horizontal-scaling](https://hashnode.com/tag/horizontal-scaling)
-   [#distributed-systems](https://hashnode.com/tag/distributed-systems)
-   [#backend](https://hashnode.com/tag/backend)
-   [#system-design](https://hashnode.com/tag/system-design)
-   [#software-engineering](https://hashnode.com/tag/software-engineering)

## Written by

[Devesh Parmar](https://hashnode.com/@deveshparmar)

@deveshparmar · Ahmedabad, Gujarat

  
[View profile](https://hashnode.com/@deveshparmar)

SDE @ Ei

Software Development Engineer ~ System Design, AI, Finance, Tech

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