Maximum Number of TCP connections


I've been quite confused about the total number of open TCP connections a host can have. Most articles on the web seem to only partly answer this question. Most emphasise the need of increasing the number of file handles a user process can have open (ulimit -u) or the total number of files the kernel can have open (viewable in/proc/sys/fs/file-max).

However, the real problem is the limit of ports that can be open. This is because the TCP specification states that the number of ports the host can handles is defined by a 16bit number. This gives a theoretical maximum of 65535 open connections. When setting up a connection, the host uses a (anonymous) local port and binds it to the requesting host: localhost:1212 -> otherhost:2332

Luckily, the story doesn't stop there. Albeit the number of ports are limited to this number, a local port can be used to connect to multiple IPs. Hence, the number of theoretical connections is (65535 - open normal files) * number of connecting IPs

This implies that scaling any host that reaches the celing of 65535 incoming connections, is to add a(nother) reverse proxy in front of it so that there are more incoming IPs that can generate more TCP connections (which must all have a unique combination of origin server, origin port, destination server and destination port.

cacheserver:80 -> proxy1:1024 cacheserver:80 -> proxy1:1025 [..] proxy1:655535

Another way to solve this, is to create multiple interfaces on the host and make the service listen to these (this might feel more like a hack than a proper solution).

In practice, this problem will only occur to the server layer receiving traffic from the outside world; your cache or web server. In multi server architectures, the servers behind the front layer, e.g. the database in a internet -> web server -> database setup, will never have a need of scaling the number of TCP connection.

It is also worth noticing, that the load balancer in front of your first/top layer must be fully transparent, so that it doesn't expose its IP to the web or cache servers serving the requests. With hardware load balancers, this is less of a problem, but with software balancers, such as HA Proxy, heed must be taken as outlined in this article.

Good articles on the subject:

- Tuning FreeBSD for many incoming connections.


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