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
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
Alexandr
Hi everyone! There is an error on the page 71 in the book “Programming machine learning from coding to depp learning” P. Perrotta. You c...
New
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
hgkjshegfskef
The test is as follows: Scenario: Intersecting a scaled sphere with a ray Given r ← ray(point(0, 0, -5), vector(0, 0, 1)) And s ← sphere...
New
adamwoolhether
Is there any place where we can discuss the solutions to some of the exercises? I can figure most of them out, but am having trouble with...
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
davetron5000
Hello faithful readers! If you have tried to follow along in the book, you are asked to start up the dev environment via dx/build and ar...
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

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
PragmaticBookshelf
Free and open source software is the default choice for the technologies that run our world, and it’s built and maintained by people like...
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
Exadra37
Please tell us what is your preferred monitor setup for programming(not gaming) and why you have chosen it. Does your monitor have eye p...
New
AstonJ
This looks like a stunning keycap set :orange_heart: A LEGENDARY KEYBOARD LIVES ON When you bought an Apple Macintosh computer in the e...
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
hilfordjames
There appears to have been an update that has changed the terminology for what has previously been known as the Taskbar Overflow - this h...
New
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Build modern server-driven web applications using htmx. Whatever programming language you use, you’ll write less (and cleaner) code. ...
New
CommunityNews
A Brief Review of the Minisforum V3 AMD Tablet. Update: I have created an awesome-minisforum-v3 GitHub repository to list information fo...
New

Sub Categories: