[avahi] scalability of avahi (or mdns-sd in general)

[Lennart Poettering]

On Thu, 15.06.06 17:17, Nicholas Andrews (tar.bz2 at gmail.com) wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I'm interested in how well mDNS-SD scales. I have heard it described
> as a lightweight protocol, but I've never seen any numbers. At what
> point does it become impractical to use it for service discovery?

According to Apple mDNS scales well for up to 1000 hosts. I don't know
if they did simulations to prove that claim. And I do not know if
Avahi actually is compatible enough with Bonjour that the claim still
holds. And finally I know nothing about the network technology they
used for that claim (100mbit ethernet, gigabit ethernet, WLAN?).

In short: it's all very vague, the only value we ever heard or read
was 1000 hosts.

A side node: I haven't seen anything about the number of *services*
mDNS scales to. Only *hosts*, which is not really the same. 

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering; lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
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