[Spread-users] consequences of making a large group

[Paul Rubel]

I'm considering adding some functionality to my system that would
entail adding every spread-using application in my system into a
single group. This group would be used to occasionally disseminate
name-service like information.

The current system has a number of smaller groups, which I would need
to keep. I'm a bit concerned about the performance ramifications of
doing this. Is this a reasonable concern? Does the size of a group
really matter or is the number of daemons and the network topology the
real limiter? Thinking about the ring topology it seems the total size
could be more important than the size of any group.

Does the group structure have any effect on recovery time when a host
is lost? I'm guessing that it doesn't as the underlying structure
needs to be repaired regardless of any group membership.

Currently we have 9 hosts with 10s of groups. Would 30 hosts 100
groups change the answer?

I'm going to try it out and see what happens but was wondering if
there are any insights from list members that I might miss just
experimenting.

   thank you for your help,
    Paul