Limit on Number of TCP/IP Connections

[Andrew]

Hi..

I am writing a .NET server program that will run on
Windows 2000 (and maybe some day on Windows 2003). It
must allow thousands of people to be connected at one time.

I would like to verify that I can do this with TCP/IP
without running into some sort of limitation. I have
verified that I can create 10,000 localhost connections
using the TcpListener/TcpClient classes. (In order to get
this to work, I had to edit the MaxUserPort registry entry
as described in Microsoft Knowledge base article [except
that step 2 in the article has a bug because it is
truncated]).

I also noticed that memory consumption was only about 20
MB when the 10,000 localhost connections were going, so
memory consumption should be fine.

I would also like to verify that I can have 10,000 TCP/IP
connections that are outside the machine, e.g., not
localhost. Verifying this may be more difficult as I do
not have another Windows server available, and I have a
suspicion that Windows XP doesn't allow you to modify the
MaxUserPort entry.

So, can anyone provide any guidance about whether having
10,000 TCP/IP connections should be feasible in this case?
Andrew

[Andrew]

I have posted this question in
microsoft.public.dotnet.distributed_apps, to see if it
gets a response there. This thread can be deleted from
dotnet.general as far as I am concerned.