An incoming connection chews up an file descripter but does not require an ephemeral port. You can trivially have more that 65k incoming connections on a linux box, but you've only got 64511 ports per ip on the box, to use for outgoing connections. I've seen boxes supporting more than a million connections with tuning in the course of normal operation. On 10/14/10 9:03 AM, johndole@hush.ai wrote:
Hi,
I am somewhat new to networking. I have interest in running a Bittorrent tracker. I ran one for a bit, and my one Linux box running Opentracker gets overloaded. My connection is good, and most of it isn't being used. Just a lot of people connect, and use up all the 65k "free connections". I tried messing with the sysctls, but it didn't help too much (and just degraded the connection quality for everyone). It is not a malicious attack either as there is only a few connections per IP and they are sending proper Bittorrent tracker requests...
So what can I do? How can I have have open more than 65k concurrent connections on standard GNU/Linux?
Thanks for any ideas and suggestions.
-John