Max Number on Workgroup

[Total]

I know technicaly a workgroup is supposed to be 10 computers or less. I myself have seen workgroups in offices with 14 computers accessing the same RAID drive and sharing an internet connection without any probolems. I was wondering what the absolute limit could be.... with a decent amount of traffic. What have you all seen out there?

[BipolarBill]

Network traffic would be the limiting factor. Imagine 50 users trying to send and receive data at the same time. Without routers and subnetting, this can quickly get out of hand.

Me? I would keep adding PCs to the workgroup until network traffic became a problem. I would think that the absolute limit to a workgroup size would be about 100 nodes.

[Rugor]

Biggest workgroup I've seen as about 40-50 nodes, but the real limit is what Bill said, when it becomes unwieldy.

[DVNT1]

A W2K Pro computer sharing files can only share to 10 concurrent users. This may be where you heard the 10 user "workgroup" idea. W2K server exceeds this limitiation and brings in the idea of "Domain" model in place of the "workgroup".


For trying to identify the max size of a peer-to-peer model you will always finds ways to keep growing (look at the Internet, it's basically peer-to-peer)
The limits will always be self imposed by the limitations of your software and hardware that you have.


If you meant "workgroup" defined as just one subnet then that depends on your network usage like BipolarBill mentioned. I've understood some networks to have over 1,000 computers in the same network segment. This is hard for me to comprehend because if I have more than about 50 computers on a segment then the network is considerably slow. In comparision to my previous example, I must have very network intense users. :)




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