spread configuration reload partitions group

Trying to expand a cluster from 20 to 32 daemons.

On the one of 20 running daemons, connected with spmonitor and issued a 
'r' to reload the configuration.  Later, new 12 daemons were started.

In a group across the original 20 daemons (1 client/daemon), 15 of the 
20 saw the other 5 disappear from their group; the unlucky 5 saw all 
other 19 disappear.

Is this expected?  Is there a way to tune for this scale of cluster to 
ride through the transient better?

[I regret to say we have logging directed to /dev/null since slow disk 
knocks the daemons over otherwise.]

thanks,
/jr