I'm trying to find out what kind of bounds the ephemeral ports allocation method in the kernel imposes on the maximum number of connections out of a given machine. Specifically, if there are 32K ephemeral ports configured, then does that mean: (a) I can have 32K connections open total, regardless of server (b) I can have 32K connections open per server (to which we connect) or (c) I can have 32K connections open per <server,port> (to which we connect)? I know that theoretically a connection is identified by its 4-tuple <SA,SP,DA,DP>, so in theory I should be able to establish a very large number of outgoing connections, much higher than the ephemeral port range would suggest, but I'm not sure how this has been implemented in practice. Thanks, -Zubin - : send the line "unsubscribe linux-net" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
