Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!sdd.hp.com!ucsd!ucbvax!SYSTEM-M.PHX.BULL.COM!Beattie
From: Beattie@SYSTEM-M.PHX.BULL.COM ("Art Beattie {AC602 862-4783}")
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.appletalk
Subject: Re: 150 nodes (atalk [0380])
Message-ID: <900919041040.339456@SYSTEM-M.PHX.BULL.COM>
Date: 19 Sep 90 04:10:00 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 26

Norman Goetz (goetz@reed.bitnet) writes:
    My question: is there some subtle problem we have or are about to
    have due to 150 nodes, to having user nodes in the upper address
    range, or to running this situation through StarControllers?

You seem to have a similar user group that we have.  Whenever any one of
our zones approaches having 100 active nodes, we start thinking of
partitioning the one zone into 2.  The list of printers in the Chooser
window starts to really jump and users get a bit concerned.  Sometimes
their printer doesn't show up in the list for a couple of minutes.

I am assuming that all 150 users are on one LocalTalk zone.  Not sure
what is on the other side of the FastPath.  At this point I would look
into getting another FastPath or Gatorbox or MultiGate and partition the
zone into 2 75 node zones.

Realize that there is *ALWAYS* traffic on the LocalTalk wiring.  The
various protocols are banging away on the zone maintaining tables and
making sure other zones are still there, etc.  A LocalTalk network is
very suspectible to congestion problems because of its speed.  It
operates very similarly to ethernet (collision recovery, etc) but due to
is speed, these mechanisms are slow.  It only takes 2 or 3 of users
doing file transfers to bring a LocalTalk zone to its knees.  LANRanger
can show you the stats on collision traffic.  It doesn't take much.

Good luck.