Yes, if you use COM connections instead of the IOM bridge, there is a Windows imposed limit of 16 connections. If you use the traditional EG repository, that is one connection, and each connected EG session is at least one more.
We strongly recommend that customers use IOM rather than DCOM because of this restriction. There are other advantages to IOM as well. See below for more info:
Integrated Object Model (IOM) Server SAS 9 Enhancements
The Integrated Object Model (IOM) server includes the following enhancements.
The IOM server has been re-engineered to take advantage of the new Threaded Kernel (TK) technology in SAS®9. This enhancement reduces response time for IOM client applications that access Component Object Model (COM) servers and IOM Bridge servers. The enhancement is transparent and does not require changes to server configurations or to client programs.
New load-balancing options in the IOM server configuration model enable more efficient deployment of server processes across machines.
A new Windows Object Manager enables clients to interact with multiple types of IOM servers. The new service creates and manages objects for four "flavors" of IOM servers: SAS Workspace Servers, SAS Metadata Servers, SAS Stored Process Servers, and SAS OLAP Servers.
A new Java Connection Service (part of SAS Foundation Services) enables clients to interact with multiple types of IOM servers.
This new service creates and manages objects for four "flavors" of IOM servers: SAS Workspace Servers, SAS Metadata Servers, SAS Stored Process Servers, and SAS OLAP Servers.
This service also provides pooling and server failover scalability features and support for load-balancing spawners.
For COM and DCOM launched servers, all file access verifications are now performed only with the user ID under which the server was launched. The additional level of security checking, which was based on the client user ID, has been removed. Before upgrading to SAS Integration Technologies 9.0 or later, the security policies at the following sites should be reviewed.
Sites that launch COM workspace servers by using the "this user" identity setting in the DCOM configuration utility
Sites that use COM+ pooling.
For more details, see the Windows Security section in the SAS Integration Technologies Developer's Guide at
http://support.sas.com/rnd/itech/doc9/dev_guide/index.html .