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

jeffmcompsci
Title: Design and Build Great Web APIs - typo “https://company-atk.herokuapp.com/2258ie4t68jv” (page 19, third bullet in URL list) Typo:...
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
adamwoolhether
When trying to generate the protobuf .go file, I receive this error: Unknown flag: --go_opt libprotoc 3.12.3 MacOS 11.3.1 Googling ...
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
rainforest
Hi, I’ve got a question about the implementation of PubSub when using a Phoenix.Socket.Transport behaviour rather than channels. Before ...
New
mert
AWDWR 7, page 152, page 153: Hello everyone, I’m a little bit lost on the hotwire part. I didn’t fully understand it. On page 152 @rub...
New
Keton
When running the program in chapter 8, “Implementing Combat”, the printout Health before attack was never printed so I assumed something ...
New
a.zampa
@mfazio23 I’m following the indications of the book and arriver ad chapter 10, but the app cannot be compiled due to an error in the Bas...
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
New

Other popular topics Top

Exadra37
I am thinking in building or buy a desktop computer for programing, both professionally and on my free time, and my choice of OS is Linux...
New
brentjanderson
Bought the Moonlander mechanical keyboard. Cherry Brown MX switches. Arms and wrists have been hurting enough that it’s time I did someth...
New
AstonJ
poll poll Be sure to check out @Dusty’s article posted here: An Introduction to Alternative Keyboard Layouts It’s one of the best write-...
New
AstonJ
There’s a whole world of custom keycaps out there that I didn’t know existed! Check out all of our Keycaps threads here: https://forum....
New
mafinar
Crystal recently reached version 1. I had been following it for awhile but never got to really learn it. Most languages I picked up out o...
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
Rails 7 completely redefines what it means to produce fantastic user experiences and provides a way to achieve all the benefits of single...
New
New
sir.laksmana_wenk
I’m able to do the “artistic” part of game-development; character designing/modeling, music, environment modeling, etc. However, I don’t...
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

Sub Categories: