Originally posted by Calibra
Nice to see so much people taking an interrest in (D)COM or COM+ as it's known now.

But please keep 1 aspect in mind with serverside run dll's/ activex's, as you have 25 or less clients connecting to it, there's isn't really an speed issue.
But when the numer of clients get above that, the network becomes the bottleneck as the problem with serverside activex's is that COM+ uses Variants to marschall it's data between client and activex.
This will clog up youre network eventually.
I think the interest has been here for a long time, but the realization that the ability to implement DCOM in a VB6 paradigm is finally sinking in.

I take issue with your point on DCOM network traffic. Keep in mind you can take more steps to minimize DCOM noise on the network - namely using a quiet protocol like TCP/IP and not using a noisy one like NETBUI.

I cannot believe that a mere 25 clients can saturate a 100 Mbit TCP/IP ethernet network? There are more steps that can be taken to optimize your network topology as well.

If you are using a HUB between your DCOM server and your clinets, then your performance will decrease linearly with respect to the number of units attached to that hub.

However, by using a "switching" hub, (or SWITCH), you remove an important bottleneck, as it allows full thoughput of every device attached to it.

Another approach is to "step up" the link between the switch and the server to a Gbit ethernet connection while leaving each connection to the client to run at 100 Mbit.

Let's not forget to mention the "horsepower" of the server itself. It should probably be a good 2GHz if not faster with plenty of RAM. Multi-CPU would be nice also.

I guarantee you will not saturate a Gbit backboned, network switched, high-powered TCP/IP server configuration with a mere 25-50 DCOM clients.

That being said, I will agree that for any given topology, there will be some maximum number of DCOM clients it can handle. Sounds like some emperical research will be required to pinpoint that number, but if you could provide some bandwidth requirements of a single average DCOM client (wrt Tx bytes/s Rx bytes/s) I could come up with a projected estimate.

I'll go out on a limb and offer the number of average DCOM clients the above ideal scenario can handle without saturating the network is more like 500.