It does scale, believe me. In order to scale you have to be able to load balance to accommodate a higher load.

Using exceptions for flow management doesn't prevent you from adding more boxes. If you're thinking it can cause performances problems, I have an app in prod; here are some numbers: * With a single box, we can do about 500 req/s for a dynamic page, accessing the database * It appears that the bottleneck is the template engine. If we cache the result (thus serving a "pseudo static" page) the exceptions-based control flow is still there but we serve up to 1000 req/s. (That's more than Apache can do to serve static content on the same machine).

So yes, Play does scale!