Improved techniques for dynamically responding to a fluctuating workload. Resources are reactively scaled for memory-intensive applications and automatically adapted to in response to workload changes without requiring pre-specified thresholds. A miss ratio curve (MRC) is generated for an application based on application runtime statistics. This MRC is then modeled as a hyperbola. An area on the hyperbola is identified as satisfying a flatten threshold. A resource allocation threshold is then established based on the identified area. This resource allocation threshold indicates how many resources are to be provisioned for the application. The resources are scaled using a resource scaling policy that is based on the resource allocation threshold.