A couple of years ago I wrote an article comparing Crystal Server to home-grown web applications. One of the things I was told at the time was that a web application would be limited to 3 active process or ‘threads’. I was also told that this limitation could be expanded by adding processors because each additional processor would make 3 more ‘threads’ available. Rick Channing, a Crystal consultant just sent me a link to a new PDF that explains this in more detail.  If the link has moved go to the Crystal Reports support site at SAP and do an “Advanced Search” for a document entitled “Component Licensing Explained”.  (Recently this type of content has been restricted to users with active support contracts). Threads are now called Concurrent Processor Licenses or CPLs.

Some new bits of information came out of this document

1) Not only do you get 3 CPLs for each added processor but:

“If all IIS applications are set to run in their own process, then each process will work with 3 CPLs.” … and …
“Often IIS is defined for one worker process to be run per application per CPU. Therefore, you would get up to a maximum of approximately 3 CPLs per CPU, or 3 CPLs per IIS worker process.”

In addition, for those of you deploying your application on Citrix:

“Since the process is created by the virtual machine, the number of true concurrent requests handled by the Crystal Reports components is not directly dependent on the physical hardware, but on the hardware reported by the VMWare or Citrix virtual machine.”