What is the upper limit of WorkflowInstances that I may have instantiated at one time?

Question

Is there an upper limit on the number of instances of WorkflowInstance I may have running at one time?

I am using .Net 3.5 and C# (not that the language should make a difference.)

Please note that I am not suggesting that it is a good design to many running at once, I am simply curious about the upper limit, if one exists.

Answer 1

I asked this question of an MS guy at a conference.

With a persistence service and idle instances unloaded, there is only a small per-saved-instance in memory (I seem to recall 64 bytes). Therefore it is easily possible for a single process to support hundreds of thousands.

Clearly you need to scale out if many of the instances are not idle to handle the processing load of the non-idle instances.

Answer 2

There is no hard-coded limit that I'm aware of, if that's what you're asking. There's a practical limit based on your system resources, obviously.