An ActiveSpaces® Transactions application can be, and often is, run on a single node. With High-availability and Distribution features, ActiveSpaces® Transactions can run distributed applications across multiple nodes. From an operational point of view, there are very few benefits from running multiple nodes on a single machine. This document recommends and assumes that each node will be run on its own machine.

When an application reaches its throughput limit on a single node, additional performance can be gained by adding multiple nodes. This is called horizontal scaling. For an application that is not designed to be distributed, this often poses a problem. Sometimes this can be addressed by adding a routing device outside of the nodes. But sometimes this cannot be addressed without rewriting the application.

A distributed ActiveSpaces® Transactions application can be spread across an arbitrary number of nodes at the High-availability data partition boundary. If the active node for a set of partitions has reached throughput saturation, one or more of the partitions may be migrated to other nodes.