I have in excess of 15,000 connections on our mail server, various stages of connections.

See little *IF ANY* performance degradation. The only time I see degradation is when multiple connections are pulling lots and lots of data at the same time...

Idle/persistent connections... pretty much take very little memory and processing to handle.

We are talking a very very significant number to hurt any modern machines. (Modern being anything newer than 4-5 years old)

That used to be the limit in the 2.2 Kernels... I believe 2.4 was much higher and I think 2.6 is again way higher.

In any case it there were a limit, it would be *PER IP* address on the physical connection.

The local PORT range absolute maximum is 65535 lowest is 0.

Come to think of it... we have Linux firewalls and regularly we have many many many thousands of connections through it, which count.

We average 32K connection on a busy day not counting REALLY busy days.

We have surpassed the 64K threshold regularly.

Today we are at about 10K at any one moment.


typo: wrong word...