Cell Performance and Scaling Considerations

To date, DCE performance and scaling studies have not been widely conducted and reported in the industry. However, we offer the following guidelines to assist with capacity planning:

· DCE core services are architected to scale both within a cell and between cells.

· A single cell may experience performance degradation if it contains more than 10,000 users.

· Use the same CPU performance criteria as if the machine was running standalone.

· CDS directories can be partitioned across multiple server machines for load balancing or replicated for failover.

· Applications can be partitioned across multiple server machines for load balancing or replicated for failover.

· A DECstation 5000/200 acting as an RPC client or server can process as many as 300 remote procedure calls per second.

· Multicell DCE environments must have at least one Global Directory Agent (GDA) in each cell. CDS clerks automatically discover the presence of CDS servers only if the clerks and servers are on the same LAN. In a WAN environment, a cell administrator must manually inform WAN-isolated CDS clerks of CDS server locations.

· Because CDS clerks cache information returned from CDS servers, initial namespace lookups may experience WAN latency, but subsequent lookups should typically be handled out of the cache and experience no WAN latency.