Help Desk
By Stephanos Gosling, guest Webmaster
Multiple TCP/IP Connections
Dear Help Desk,
I need to find a machine capable of handling a great deal of multiple TCP/IP sockets at once. The total simultaneous connections matter more to me than the data transmission speed. How can I find this information? Is it a software or hardware issue?
—Sergio
Dear Sergio,
Maximum socket connectivity depends on the type of application you've built, the exact platform it runs on, and ultimately, how much money you're willing to spend.
The theoretical limit imposed by TCP (and applicable to all operating systems) on the number of connections is in the order of tens of thousands per second, depending on the type of data being transferred. It should be noted, however, that you're unlikely to reach this amount in a live environment unless you have serious hardware and network bandwidth.
The total number of connections a single computer handles efficiently is governed by several factors, such as the system's memory, processing power, implementation of the TCP/IP stack, and the load the system already experiences.
If you're more interested in concurrent connections than data throughput, the truly critical factors are memory, of the system and processor cache, and stack design in the kernel. Computing power for a medium-sized application should be handled easily by a dual or quad processor system, whether its architecture is Alpha, Intel, or Sparc.
