This article explains how many volumes a Mac OS-based AppleShare client or an AppleShare server may safely mount and operate.

AppleShare Clients

With pre-3.7 Clients, AppleShare is limited by AppleTalk to 20 server connections. You can mount more than 20 volumes, but you can connect with only 20 different servers.

With AppleShare Client 3.7 you can connect to about 250 different servers over TCP/IP and 20 over AppleTalk. The practical limit here is memory in the System heap. Each connection allocates about 10k of data structures for TCP/IP, or 4k for AppleTalk.

One of the causes of the long "pauses with the network arrows" is that the client must poll each mounted volume to see if the modification date has changed. The Client sends a GetVolParms command to each mounted volume every 10 seconds. The more volumes you have mounted the more polling takes place. Usually this is a very quick operation, but response time may vary.

AppleShare IP 5.0 Servers and the 3.7 Client have fixed this problem by adding Server Notifications. The 3.7 Client does not poll the Server. Instead, the Server notifies the Client when a volume has changed. This is one of the new things in AFP 2.2.

AppleShare Servers

In the case of a server mounting volumes from other servers, the limit is the same as above, although for best performance avoid keeping remote volumes mounted.

The maximum number of volumes is 50 in all versions since AppleShare 3.0. The maximum number of items that can be shared on these 50 volumes is 100 in AppleShare 4.2.1, AppleShare IP 5.0.x, and AppleShare IP 6.x. In previous versions of AppleShare it was 50.