Policy Server Guides › Policy Server Administration Guide › Scaling Your SiteMinder Environment › How to Determine When to Add Policy Servers

How to Determine When to Add Policy Servers

Each Policy Server in the SiteMinder environment must have adequate resources to perform its tasks. As user populations grow and resources are added to the environment, the demands placed on each Policy Server within the environment grow. If the demands placed on the Policy Server exceed the capabilities of the server, performance suffers.

By default, the Policy Server provides 256 sockets for port 44443 (authorization, authentication, and accounting) when installed on either Windows NT or UNIX. Each socket can remain open for an unlimited period of time.

Two general factors can help you determine when to add Policy Servers to your environment:

• Determining the number of sockets a Web Agent opens to the Policy Server
• Determining the number of Web Agents a Policy Server supports