How many socket connections can a web server handle?

Question

Say if I was to get shared, virtual or dedicated hosting, I read somewhere a server/machine can only handle 64,000 TCP connections at one time, is this true? How many could any type of hosting handle regardless of bandwidth? I'm assuming HTTP works over TCP.

Would this mean only 64,000 users could connect to the website, and if I wanted to serve more I'd have to move to a web farm?

Answer 1

In short: You should be able to achieve in the order of millions of simultaneous active TCP connections and by extension HTTP request(s). This tells you the maximum performance you can expect with the right platform with the right configuration.

Today, I was worried whether IIS with ASP.NET would support in the order of 100 concurrent connections (look at my update, expect ~10k responses per second on older ASP.Net Mono versions). When I saw this question/answers, I couldn't resist answering myself, many answers to the question here are completely incorrect.

Best Case

The answer to this question must only concern itself with the simplest server configuration to decouple from the countless variables and configurations possible downstream.

So consider the following scenario for my answer:

1. No traffic on the TCP sessions, except for keep-alive packets (otherwise you would obviously need a corresponding amount of network bandwidth and other computer resources)
2. Software designed to use asynchronous sockets and programming, rather than a hardware thread per request from a pool. (ie. IIS, Node.js, Nginx... webserver [but not Apache] with async designed application software)
3. Good performance/dollar CPU / Ram. Today, arbitrarily, let's say i7 (4 core) with 8GB of RAM.
4. A good firewall/router to match.
5. No virtual limit/governor - ie. Linux somaxconn, IIS web.config...
6. No dependency on other slower hardware - no reading from harddisk, because it would be the lowest common denominator and bottleneck, not network IO.

Detailed Answer

Synchronous thread-bound designs tend to be the worst performing relative to Asynchronous IO implementations.

WhatsApp can handle a million WITH traffic on a single Unix flavoured OS machine - https://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2012/01/1-million-is-so-2011/.

And finally, this one, http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/5/13/the-secret-to-10-million-concurrent-connections-the-kernel-i.html, goes into a lot of detail, exploring how even 10 million could be achieved. Servers often have hardware TCP offload engines, ASICs designed for this specific role more efficiently than a general purpose CPU.

Good software design choices

Asynchronous IO design will differ across Operating Systems and Programming platforms. Node.js was designed with asynchronous in mind. You should use Promises at least, and when ECMAScript 7 comes along, async/await. C#/.Net already has full asynchronous support like node.js. Whatever the OS and platform, asynchronous should be expected to perform very well. And whatever language you choose, look for the keyword "asynchronous", most modern languages will have some support, even if it's an add-on of some sort.

To WebFarm?

Whatever the limit is for your particular situation, yes a web-farm is one good solution to scaling. There are many architectures for achieving this. One is using a load balancer (hosting providers can offer these, but even these have a limit, along with bandwidth ceiling), but I don't favour this option. For Single Page Applications with long-running connections, I prefer to instead have an open list of servers which the client application will choose from randomly at startup and reuse over the lifetime of the application. This removes the single point of failure (load balancer) and enables scaling through multiple data centres and therefore much more bandwidth.

Busting a myth - 64K ports

To address the question component regarding "64,000", this is a misconception. A server can connect to many more than 65535 clients. See https://networkengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/48283/is-a-tcp-server-limited-to-65535-clients/48284

By the way, Http.sys on Windows permits multiple applications to share the same server port under the HTTP URL schema. They each register a separate domain binding, but there is ultimately a single server application proxying the requests to the correct applications.

Update 2019-05-30

Here is an up to date comparison of the fastest HTTP libraries - https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r16&hw=ph&test=plaintext

• Test date: 2018-06-06
• Hardware used: Dell R440 Xeon Gold + 10 GbE
• The leader has ~7M plaintext reponses per second (responses not connections)
• The second one Fasthttp for golang advertises 1.5M concurrent connections - see https://github.com/valyala/fasthttp
• The leading languages are Rust, Go, C++, Java, C, and even C# ranks at 11 (6.9M per second). Scala and Clojure rank further down. Python ranks at 29th at 2.7M per second.
• At the bottom of the list, I note laravel and cakephp, rails, aspnet-mono-ngx, symfony, zend. All below 10k per second. Note, most of these frameworks are build for dynamic pages and quite old, there may be newer variants that feature higher up in the list.
• Remember this is HTTP plaintext, not for the Websocket specialty: many people coming here will likely be interested in concurrent connections for websocket.