ciaranjodonnell

ciaranjodonnell

Release It! Second Edition: Wrong number of TCP Connections (page 55)

The description of the limits of TCP connections on your server is kind of wrong.
The book says:

If you look at the TCP packet format, you’ll see that a port number is 16 bits long. It can only go up to 65535. Different OSs use different port ranges for ephemeral sockets, but the IANA recommended range is 49152 to 65535. That gives your server the ability to have at most 16,383 connections open. But your machine is probably dedicated to your service rather than handling, say, user logins. So we can stretch that range to ports 1024–65535, for a maximum of 64,511 connections.
Now I’ll tell you that some servers are handling more than a million concurrent
connections. Some people are pushing toward ten million connections on a
single machine.
If there are only 64,511 ports available for connections, how can a server have a million connections? The secret is virtual IP addresses. The operating system binds additional IP addresses to the same network interface. Each IP address has its own range of port numbers, so we would need a total of 16 IP addresses to handle that many connections.

This TCP information is sort of correct, but the implication is wrong. Those limits apply to the number of server processes that can LISTEN for connections. However those processes can accept lots of connections from different source IP Address/Port combinations. So a single process could handle thousands of connections on a single port. This is how all web servers work. The server listens on port 80, and accepts a request from my IP address with port like 43567. While processing my request it can also accept another connection from YOUR IP Address with whatever port number your web browser connected out from.

So having LOTs of listening processes might need virtual IP addresses, but having a single application accept lots of connections only needs one IP Address and one listening port.

Where Next?

Popular Pragmatic Bookshelf topics Top

jon
Some minor things in the paper edition that says “3 2020” on the title page verso, not mentioned in the book’s errata online: p. 186 But...
New
edruder
I thought that there might be interest in using the book with Rails 6.1 and Ruby 2.7.2. I’ll note what I needed to do differently here. ...
New
herminiotorres
Hi! I know not the intentions behind this narrative when called, on page XI: mount() |> handle_event() |> render() but the correc...
New
jskubick
I think I might have found a problem involving SwitchCompat, thumbTint, and trackTint. As entered, the SwitchCompat changes color to hol...
New
brunogirin
When installing Cards as an editable package, I get the following error: ERROR: File “setup.py” not found. Directory cannot be installe...
New
brunogirin
When trying to run tox in parallel as explained on page 151, I got the following error: tox: error: argument -p/–parallel: expected one...
New
taguniversalmachine
It seems the second code snippet is missing the code to set the current_user: current_user: Accounts.get_user_by_session_token(session["...
New
kolossal
Hi, I need some help, I’m new to rust and was learning through your book. but I got stuck at the last stage of distribution. Whenever I t...
New
andreheijstek
After running /bin/setup, the first error was: The foreman' command exists in these Ruby versions: That was easy to fix: gem install fore...
New
Keton
When running the program in chapter 8, “Implementing Combat”, the printout Health before attack was never printed so I assumed something ...
New

Other popular topics Top

Devtalk
Hello Devtalk World! Please let us know a little about who you are and where you’re from :nerd_face:
New
Rainer
My first contact with Erlang was about 2 years ago when I used RabbitMQ, which is written in Erlang, for my job. This made me curious and...
New
AstonJ
In case anyone else is wondering why Ruby 3 doesn’t show when you do asdf list-all ruby :man_facepalming: do this first: asdf plugin-upd...
New
Margaret
Hello everyone! This thread is to tell you about what authors from The Pragmatic Bookshelf are writing on Medium.
1147 29994 760
New
AstonJ
We’ve talked about his book briefly here but it is quickly becoming obsolete - so he’s decided to create a series of 7 podcasts, the firs...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight: Peter Ullrich @PJUllrich Data is at the core of every business, but it is useless if nobody can access and analyze ...
New
New
AstonJ
This is a very quick guide, you just need to: Download LM Studio: https://lmstudio.ai/ Click on search Type DeepSeek, then select the o...
New
Margaret
Ask Me Anything with Mark Volkmann @mvolkmann On February 24 and 25, we are giving you a chance to ask questions of PragProg author M...
New
RobertRichards
Hair Salon Games for Girls Fun Girls Hair Saloon game is mainly developed for kids. This game allows users to select virtual avatars to ...
New

Sub Categories: