Does Windows XP only allow 10 inbound TCP/IP connections at any one time?

Solution 1:

The TCP connection limit is not enforced, but it may be bound by legal agreement to not permit more than 10 clients.

See this from Microsoft: Inbound connections limit in Windows XP

In a command prompt type:

net config server

This shows max allowed logged on users, and max open files per session

Solution 2:

Technically it is sessions. And it has nothing to do with TCP/IP.

This is to prevent the Home and Professional edition Windows from being used as Servers.

I don't blame them. If they supported more concurrent sessions, that would mean they would have to test that limit. Then fix whatever bugs that show up. And then more testing. All for a Home edition. . .

That's less time for features that the rest of us use. BTW, that limit was removed in Vista SP2.

Solution 3:

The default connection limit for IIS on Windows XP is 10 connections. This can be increased to 40 connections, but not higher than that.

From http://weblogs.asp.net/cazzu/archive/2003/10/10/31476.aspx:

Find the adsutil.vbs script (should be in c:\inetpub\AdminScripts or similar) and run the following command:

adsutil set w3svc/MaxConnections 40

You can also disable "allow keepalives" in IIS which should allow you to serve connections faster, though it is still limited to the number of concurrent connections above. If it is a simple webservice, you shouldn't really need keepalives anyway.

Besides the obvious answer of purchasing a Server OS, or to use Apache for Windows (if you aren't running ASP.net apps), since it does not have the same limit that IIS has.