Musings: Table Size

I had an odd dream last night where I was running a D&D game (in fact, when I have these games there's always one dungeon I'm running where I can almost see the map when I wake up) in a relatively public space. At first it was for 5 players, but then we met again and there were 5 more and the dream got recursive where I had to explain to the newcomers what happened last game, and at the end of the dream I was doing it again to explain it to the 5 more players as I had 15 people at the table.

This is way more people than I like to game for - I don't care for tables larger than 5, maybe 6 at the outside. The most I've ever done is 9, and that was with a co-GM. That smaller preferred table size is one reason why I so often fall back on the primary and secondary PC models to fill in the cast of a campaign without having so many players.

So the question to the throngs is "how many people do you like having at the gaming table at one time?" bonus points for "and how well does that work?"