What is the practical limit on the size of a DCE cell?
Good question. There are no hard and fast answers, but there are some large-ish cells in operation. Certainly it is reasonable to plan on cells with thousands of nodes and perhaps tens of thousands of users. The University of Michigan Center for Information Technology Integration has done a study in which they added 50,000 entries to the Cell Directory and to the security registry. Their results are reported in technical reports 93-12 and 94-1. See Q 3.01 for the ftp site for CITI tech reports. Lexis-Nexis has a more recent study in which they added 400,000 accounts to the DCE registry. The write-up was available at their web site http://www.lexis-nexis.com/ but if it is still there, you apparently must be a subscriber to see it. Several years ago IBM’s DCE performance testing (see Q 2p-01 above for citation) includes load testing to simulate the environment of a large cell. A short, oversimplified, summary is that server machines based on 486/66 and P90 (running OS/2) could support th
