Although PingDirectory Server supports very large static groups (with hundreds of thousands of members or more), these can have a significant impact on performance. It can be expensive in terms of system resources to update the group to add or remove members because each update requires rewriting the entire entry. It can also be expensive to decode the entry when retrieving it from the database (even if it is held in the database cache), and to return the list of members to a client in search results.
If possible, consider replacing large static groups with dynamic groups. Dynamic groups automatically determine their membership based on criteria defined in LDAP URLs. A dynamic group consumes very little memory and disk space and does not need to be altered as entries are created, updated, and removed. And in some cases, it may be possible to use virtual static groups in conjunction with dynamic groups to create entries that behave like static groups for read operations in order to maintain compatibility with applications that only understand static groups but use dynamic groups behind the scenes to determine membership.
If it is not possible to eliminate large static groups, you may wish to enable the static group entry cache. While this will not reduce the performance impact of updating large static groups, it can make it much more efficient to access those groups for read operations.