Reasonable maximum number of parties on a single Canton participant?

Questions
1

What is a reasonable design limit to the number of parties to be hosted on a single Canton participant node? 1K? 10K? 100K? 1M? 10M?

Let’s assume that the node is sufficient to handle the load for the associated contracts from all these parties.

2

If you are going to push the limits, you will need to perform realistic tests with your network topology, workflows, surrounding components, etc. For example, your system may run into issues related to:

  • The backend’s ability to manage large number of parties.
  • The backend’s and IAM’s ability to support the User Management feature, if your system uses that feature.
  • The node’s memory footprint and initialization delays.

In Nov 2023, we tested a highly-provisioned participant node with 250K parties with real-world workflows and contracts. The participant node performed well. That test showed that the ListKnownParties endpoint of the Ledger API would exceed gRPC message size limits with that many parties. Consequently, that endpoint has since been updated to support pagination.