How Much of a Load Do You Want to Put On Your Network—and Can It Handle It?
How many computers do you want hooked in? And how much of a strain will they place on the network before it crashes or slows down to a bothersome extent?
If people are running data-base programs on colleagues’ files, a network might only work with a few users, but if they’re just occasionally swapping electronic files, the same system may accommodate hundreds of computers.
That’s especially true, say, if you’re a publishing house with many writers but few editors. The writers may not communicate much between themselves, so that the handful of editors are the only ones really taxing the system. And since they’re not running other people’s programs, even the editors won’t be that much of a burden.
The same principle might apply to an educational network in which one teacher is overseeing many students.