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

johnp
Running the examples in chapter 5 c under pytest 5.4.1 causes an AttributeError: ‘module’ object has no attribute ‘config’. In particula...
New
jamis
The following is cross-posted from the original Ray Tracer Challenge forum, from a post by garfieldnate. I’m cross-posting it so that the...
New
sdmoralesma
Title: Web Development with Clojure, Third Edition - migrations/create not working: p159 When I execute the command: user=> (create-...
New
mikecargal
Title: Hands-On Rust (Chapter 11: prefab) Just played a couple of amulet-less games. With a bit of debugging, I believe that your can_p...
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
lirux
Hi Jamis, I think there’s an issue with a test on chapter 6. I own the ebook, version P1.0 Feb. 2019. This test doesn’t pass for me: ...
New
brian-m-ops
#book-python-testing-with-pytest-second-edition Hi. Thanks for writing the book. I am just learning so this might just of been an issue ...
New
adamwoolhether
I’m not quite sure what’s going on here, but I’m unable to have to containers successfully complete the Readiness/Liveness checks. I’m im...
New
oaklandgit
Hi, I completed chapter 6 but am getting the following error when running: thread 'main' panicked at 'Failed to load texture: IoError(O...
New
AufHe
I’m a newbie to Rails 7 and have hit an issue with the bin/Dev script mentioned on pages 112-113. Iteration A1 - Seeing the list of prod...
New

Other popular topics Top

dasdom
No chair. I have a standing desk. This post was split into a dedicated thread from our thread about chairs :slight_smile:
New
PragmaticBookshelf
From finance to artificial intelligence, genetic algorithms are a powerful tool with a wide array of applications. But you don't need an ...
New
AstonJ
I ended up cancelling my Moonlander order as I think it’s just going to be a bit too bulky for me. I think the Planck and the Preonic (o...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Learn different ways of writing concurrent code in Elixir and increase your application's performance, without sacrificing scalability or...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Rails 7 completely redefines what it means to produce fantastic user experiences and provides a way to achieve all the benefits of single...
New
Help
I am trying to crate a game for the Nintendo switch, I wanted to use Java as I am comfortable with that programming language. Can you use...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight Rebecca Skinner @RebeccaSkinner Welcome to our latest author spotlight, where we sit down with Rebecca Skinner, auth...
New
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Develop, deploy, and debug BEAM applications using BEAMOps: a new paradigm that focuses on scalability, fault tolerance, and owning each ...
New
AstonJ
Curious what kind of results others are getting, I think actually prefer the 7B model to the 32B model, not only is it faster but the qua...
New

Sub Categories: