[Pcsclite-muscle] HELP! Any experience on smart card chip wearing?

[Umberto Rustichelli]

Dear all, I do not know if this is the right place to ask but I think it 
is the only place where the best experience with smart cards is shared.
I'm recently struggling with some issues when using smart cards for 
massive signatures production where massive means a few millions 
consecutive signatures for each card (what you wouldn't do to meet the 
absurd customers' demand!)...

I think it is irrelevant but let me point out that this applies to cards 
from two different vendors and with 2 different (USB) card readers; the 
environment can handle up to 98 smart cards (yes, I changed a few 
parameters in header files) but just 14 are connected. In production, 
only one card type (InCard 34v2 common used in Italy) and only one 
reader type are used.

To make it short, does anybody know of any predictable limit that can 
cause failures (after "many" signatures the *cards disconnect*, one by 
one) among the following:

- cards cannot reliably work for more than N signatures
   ...I know that RAM in cards should work well for N * 10^5
   write operations, considering that some writing operations
   may be involved when signing, that can be an issue and
   would point to chip wearing?

- some counters in the PCSC / CCID code that may be
   troublesome after a number of operations (honestly,
   I found none but I'm not an expert here)?

- any known issue with smart card drivers, in the specific case
   the proprietary InCard driver? The SW involved is
   pcsc-lite, cccid, (OpenSC) pkcs11_engine for OpenSSL
   and, of course, the driver itself

Did anybody try such massive use of cards?
Please help if you have any experience to share on this or point me to 
some documents or forum that can be more appropriate.

Thanks

  Umberto Rustichelli