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

jesse050717
Title: Web Development with Clojure, Third Edition, pg 116 Hi - I just started chapter 5 and I am stuck on page 116 while trying to star...
New
jdufour
Hello! On page xix of the preface, it says there is a community forum "… for help if your’re stuck on one of the exercises in this book… ...
New
joepstender
The generated iex result below should list products instead of product for the metadata. (page 67) iex> product = %Product{} %Pento....
New
cro
I am working on the “Your Turn” for chapter one and building out the restart button talked about on page 27. It recommends looking into ...
New
jskubick
I’m under the impression that when the reader gets to page 136 (“View Data with the Database Inspector”), the code SHOULD be able to buil...
New
brunogirin
When I run the coverage example to report on missing lines, I get: pytest --cov=cards --report=term-missing ch7 ERROR: usage: pytest [op...
New
brunogirin
When running tox for the first time, I got the following error: ERROR: InterpreterNotFound: python3.10 I realised that I was running ...
New
dsmith42
Hey there, I’m enjoying this book and have learned a few things alredayd. However, in Chapter 4 I believe we are meant to see the “>...
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
bjnord
Hello @herbert ! Trying to get the very first “Hello, Bracket Terminal!" example to run (p. 53). I develop on an Amazon EC2 instance runn...
New

Other popular topics Top

AstonJ
If it’s a mechanical keyboard, which switches do you have? Would you recommend it? Why? What will your next keyboard be? Pics always w...
New
AstonJ
What chair do you have while working… and why? Is there a ‘best’ type of chair or working position for developers?
New
ohm
Which, if any, games do you play? On what platform? I just bought (and completed) Minecraft Dungeons for my Nintendo Switch. Other than ...
New
New
Exadra37
Oh just spent so much time on this to discover now that RancherOS is in end of life but Rancher is refusing to mark the Github repo as su...
New
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight: VM Brasseur @vmbrasseur We have a treat for you today! We turn the spotlight onto Open Source as we sit down with V...
New
First poster: bot
zig/http.zig at 7cf2cbb33ef34c1d211135f56d30fe23b6cacd42 · ziglang/zig. General-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaini...
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
mindriot
Ok, well here are some thoughts and opinions on some of the ergonomic keyboards I have, I guess like mini review of each that I use enoug...
New

Sub Categories: