More discussion on 35,000 clients....

This is a response to a private note sent by Bill Colwell...Bill, I hope
you don't mind my responding to the list on this one...you raised
some good points that are probably of interest to all.

The ADSM database scales fairly well...theoretically there are almost no
limitations to # clients, # files, and size of database.  However, very
large databases will impact performance.  Degradation seen will largely
be a function of server CPU/IO capacity and number of database entries.
We are working on some enhancements to ADSM V2 that will improve
the upward scalability of the ADSM database.  These enhancements (most
of them are internal) will probably come out through service and
should improve performance for large databases such as you might
see with 10s of thousands of clients.
With 35,000 servers...you're probably going to want to have
multiple servers.

Another point Bill made about large databases is the performance
of server processes such as Expire Inventory....and that they should
be restartable.  Most server processes, including expire inventory,
are restartable.  Expire inventory groups database transactions...
it expires files in groups of 16...so if the expire process is
cancelled, only the last group of 16 is rolled back...any files
in previous transactions are already committed.

Greg Tevis
ADSM technical support

P.S.  Bill...your 'move node' requirement is in our adsm
database as a recognized requirement.  There is no scheduled plan
for it yet but it is one I believe we want to do.