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

jimmykiang
This test is broken right out of the box… — FAIL: TestAgent (7.82s) agent_test.go:77: Error Trace: agent_test.go:77 agent_test.go:...
New
belgoros
Following the steps described in Chapter 6 of the book, I’m stuck with running the migration as described on page 84: bundle exec sequel...
New
sdmoralesma
Title: Web Development with Clojure, Third Edition - migrations/create not working: p159 When I execute the command: user=> (create-...
New
raul
Page 28: It implements io.ReaderAt on the store type. Sorry if it’s a dumb question but was the io.ReaderAt supposed to be io.ReadAt? ...
New
AleksandrKudashkin
On the page xv there is an instruction to run bin/setup from the main folder. I downloaded the source code today (12/03/21) and can’t see...
New
AndyDavis3416
@noelrappin Running the webpack dev server, I receive the following warning: ERROR in tsconfig.json TS18003: No inputs were found in c...
New
hazardco
On page 78 the following code appears: <%= link_to ‘Destroy’, product, class: ‘hover:underline’, method: :delete, data: { confirm...
New
taguniversalmachine
Hi, I am getting an error I cannot figure out on my test. I have what I think is the exact code from the book, other than I changed “us...
New
dtonhofer
@parrt In the context of Chapter 4.3, the grammar Java.g4, meant to parse Java 6 compilation units, no longer passes ANTLR (currently 4....
New
SlowburnAZ
Getting an error when installing the dependencies at the start of this chapter: could not compile dependency :exla, "mix compile" failed...
New

Other popular topics Top

PragmaticBookshelf
Brace yourself for a fun challenge: build a photorealistic 3D renderer from scratch! In just a couple of weeks, build a ray tracer that r...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Learn from the award-winning programming series that inspired the Elixir language, and go on a step-by-step journey through the most impo...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Write Elixir tests that you can be proud of. Dive into Elixir’s test philosophy and gain mastery over the terminology and concepts that u...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Rust is an exciting new programming language combining the power of C with memory safety, fearless concurrency, and productivity boosters...
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
If you get Can't find emacs in your PATH when trying to install Doom Emacs on your Mac you… just… need to install Emacs first! :lol: bre...
New
New
New
AnfaengerAlex
Hello, I’m a beginner in Android development and I’m facing an issue with my project setup. In my build.gradle.kts file, I have the foll...
New
AstonJ
This is cool! DEEPSEEK-V3 ON M4 MAC: BLAZING FAST INFERENCE ON APPLE SILICON We just witnessed something incredible: the largest open-s...
New

Sub Categories: