How many socket connections possible?
I achieved 1600k concurrent idle socket connections, and at the same time 57k req/s on a Linux desktop (16G RAM, I7 2600 CPU). It's a single thread http server written in C with epoll. Source code is on github, a blog here.
Edit:
I did 600k concurrent HTTP connections (client & server) on both the same computer, with JAVA/Clojure . detail info post, HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5127251
The cost of a connection(with epoll):
- application need some RAM per connection
- TCP buffer 2 * 4k ~ 10k, or more
- epoll need some memory for a file descriptor, from epoll(7)
Each registered file descriptor costs roughly 90 bytes on a 32-bit kernel, and roughly 160 bytes on a 64-bit kernel.
This depends not only on the operating system in question, but also on configuration, potentially real-time configuration.
For Linux:
cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max
will show the current maximum number of file descriptors total allowed to be opened simultaneously. Check out http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~brecht/servers/openfiles.html
10,000? 70,000? is that all :)
FreeBSD is probably the server you want, Here's a little blog post about tuning it to handle 100,000 connections, its has had some interesting features like zero-copy sockets for some time now, along with kqueue to act as a completion port mechanism.
Solaris can handle 100,000 connections back in the last century!. They say linux would be better
The best description I've come across is this presentation/paper on writing a scalable webserver. He's not afraid to say it like it is :)
Same for software: the cretins on the application layer forced great innovations on the OS layer. Because Lotus Notes keeps one TCP connection per client open, IBM contributed major optimizations for the ”one process, 100.000 open connections” case to Linux
And the O(1) scheduler was originally created to score well on some irrelevant Java benchmark. The bottom line is that this bloat benefits all of us.
A limit on the number of open sockets is configurable in the /proc file system
cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max
Max for incoming connections in the OS defined by integer limits.
Linux itself allows billions of open sockets.
To use the sockets you need an application listening, e.g. a web server, and that will use a certain amount of RAM per socket.
RAM and CPU will introduce the real limits. (modern 2017, think millions not billions)
1 millions is possible, not easy. Expect to use X Gigabytes of RAM to manage 1 million sockets.
Outgoing TCP connections are limited by port numbers ~65000 per IP. You can have multiple IP addresses, but not unlimited IP addresses. This is a limit in TCP not Linux.