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

iPaul
page 37 ANTLRInputStream input = new ANTLRInputStream(is); as of ANTLR 4 .8 should be: CharStream stream = CharStreams.fromStream(i...
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
herminiotorres
Hi @Margaret , On page VII the book tells us the example and snippets will be all using Elixir version 1.11 But on page 3 almost the en...
New
raul
Hi Travis! Thank you for the cool book! :slight_smile: I made a list of issues and thought I could post them chapter by chapter. I’m rev...
New
JohnS
I can’t setup the Rails source code. This happens in a working directory containing multiple (postgres) Rails apps. With: ruby-3.0.0 s...
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
Henrai
Hi, I’m working on the Chapter 8 of the book. After I add add the point_offset, I’m still able to see acne: In the image above, I re...
New
tkhobbes
After some hassle, I was able to finally run bin/setup, now I have started the rails server but I get this error message right when I vis...
New
Keton
When running the program in chapter 8, “Implementing Combat”, the printout Health before attack was never printed so I assumed something ...
New
redconfetti
Docker-Machine became part of the Docker Toolbox, which was deprecated in 2020, long after Docker Desktop supported Docker Engine nativel...
New

Other popular topics Top

Devtalk
Reading something? Working on something? Planning something? Changing jobs even!? If you’re up for sharing, please let us know what you’...
1050 21151 394
New
New
AstonJ
I’ve been hearing quite a lot of comments relating to the sound of a keyboard, with one of the most desirable of these called ‘thock’, he...
New
New
Maartz
Hi folks, I don’t know if I saw this here but, here’s a new programming language, called Roc Reminds me a bit of Elm and thus Haskell. ...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight Mike Riley @mriley This month, we turn the spotlight on Mike Riley, author of Portable Python Projects. Mike’s book ...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Programming Ruby is the most complete book on Ruby, covering both the language itself and the standard library as well as commonly used t...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Get the comprehensive, insider information you need for Rails 8 with the new edition of this award-winning classic. Sam Ruby @rubys ...
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
Fl4m3Ph03n1x
Background Lately I am in a quest to find a good quality TTS ai generation tool to run locally in order to create audio for some videos I...
New

Sub Categories: