[Spread-users] Spread suitability?

[Stephen Hansen]

Greetings.

	I'm doing some research on the possibility of using spread in a
series of products here. At first I was awfully excited about the prospects,
but the more that I read the more I am a bit concerned that it might not be
what I'm looking for. Since you all are experts, I thought I'd ask you :)

	Basically, I have an arbitrary number of workstations installed on a
site. Their state is totally unpredictable; any number may actually be
working at any given time. Am I correct in assuming there is a hard limit of
128 such machines involved in the spread communication network? That limit
might be a problem.

	I was hoping to use spread as a lightweight communication medium;
these workstations will be sending quite a few small messages around the
network. I havn't decided precisely how that organization will be yet: the
messages might get processed through a central server(s), to be then acted
upon and distributed if nessecary, or it might be a global/group send.

	In general, messages sent to the workstations aren't important: if
they don't go through they don't go through. Messages sent from the
workstations to the server(s) are much more important. 

	Anyways: I know this is awfully vague, but is there any obvious
problems with using spread for this purpose that anyone is aware of?

Thanks!

--Stephen